Linda
Easter is a Waco artist who works exclusively in oils. She showed
several portraits and landscapes that she has painted, including the one
at right. Her style is impressionistic and loose and shows a strong bond
with her subjects. She particularly enjoys – and excels at – painting
faces. She prefers to have the subject
looking
away, rather than staring directly out of the painting. She likes to
paint from life, because that allows her to see more than just one
frozen moment of time. But patient models are hard to come by, so she
usually has to settle for a photograph. Even then, her portraits look
like real people, rather than idealized, generic ones. For our demo, she
used as her subject an image of a child from a website called “Paint My
Photo,” which she displayed on her iPad mounted on a tripod to the side
of her easel, shown at left.
She
painted on a warm toned, medium-valued canvas, which helped to establish
a range of values. She began her underpainting with a quick sketch of
the tilt of the head and the placement of the facial features (top
right).
She
cautioned against making a detailed drawing first so that the painting
will stay loose and open to modification as the work progresses. She
next defined the shadow areas, eye sockets, mouth,
nose,
and hair with a mixture of purple, raw sienna and veridian (top left).
She painted in a purplish background and the dark collar on the clothing
to frame the face (bottom right). By squinting she located and painted
the lightest light value on the face and hair and the pink on the cheeks
(bottom right). She then added details, blending the colors as she went,
creating the soft contours of the young child's face and hair. Two
stages of this are shown at the right and left of the next paragraph.
Linda
uses Robert Simmons bristle filbert brushes to apply paint, often only
one for the whole painting, cleaning the brush between colors
with
blue label Terpenoid. She also uses soft natural hair brushes for
blending. She likes Holbein paints because they are uniformly soft,
needing no medium. Rembrandt paints are also good, but she found that
the lids break before the paint runs out. Her palette consists of
titanium white, ultramarine blue, vermillion, cobalt blue, yellow ocher,
raw sienna, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow and red, quinachrodome red
rose, veridian, and transparent oxide red (Rembrandt only).
While
Linda didn't complete the painting during the demo, she had it well
developed. At right is a late stage, at left is the end of the demo.
Because she took time
to
explain what she was doing, she actually painted for no more than an
hour and a half. In another hour or two, she could probably have
finished it. That efficiency enables her to sell high quality original
oils at reasonable prices. We very much enjoyed seeing the painting
evolve under Linda's skillful hand. We thank her for coming. We also
thank those who brought refreshments and those who brought art for Show
and Tell, examples of which are shown below.
Show and
Tell:
Pat Blackwell
Ellen Foster
Bill Franklin
Judy Franklin
Charleen Isbell
Kit Travis
