April - Week 4

Written 05/05/2025

Final piece!

A woman with a bottle

The theme

I suppose the theme of this work is the inherently interesting nature of life's surroundings. A simple portrait of my partner's sister has so many things that I had to think about with intentionality (mixing the colours, knowing what details to focus on and what I can abstract away) - very much how Impressionists worked (I like to think)

Thoughts on the process

The process was LONG, unlike myJanuary pieceI actually used oil paint this time (found some in Aldi and then bought a more expensive tube of white paint in an art shop).

This had it's ups and downs; on the one hand oil paint is very forgiving of mistakes - it wasn't too hard to fix some mistkakes I made by scraping it off or blending on the canvas. On the other hand oil paint takes FOREVER to dry so I had to wait days between different sections (this is why this took me over a week to finish) and it's a bugger to get off the paintbrush (I had to buy some paint thinner in the end - I really underestimated oil paint even though from doing Biology at school I know that oil is water resistant!)

I will say though, I did enjoy the process of painting overall and like with the drawing I felt nice not needing to strictly adhere to one specific reference and amalgamate things :)

You can see the progression of the piecehere

Comparison with inspiration

As you can see, my final picture is much flatter looking in terms of depth than Gwen John's original. I LIKE to think this is due to having less time but it is really due to not really being able to fully grasp all of the fundamentals of shading that Gwen John had. The colours are also a lot more vibrant than Gwen John's, despite my best efforts I REALLY struggled with muting the colours down enough (partly because I worried about wasting so much white and brown paint). However, I AM happy with the brush strokes, as that's something out of my comfort zone regarding painting and am glad it (sort of) matches what Gwen John did.