Commission #4
14 s 18
This 12 year old couldn't relax in front of the camera. His grandmother sent me 3 disks of images and he was mugging in most every shot, and if he wasn't doing that, then the angle, lighting or some other aspect of the photo made it a poor reference.
I narrowed it down to a few photos and this is the one that his family thought was most like the boy: vigorous and colourful. They didn't mind that his face wasn't visible so I'm betting that a huge part of his personality is conveyed through movement.
Because he's long and lean, I felt that I needed to balance his slight body with some robust paint. There's a lot of chunky brush and palette knife work in this painting. I emphasized the movement of the jump by avoiding too many hard edges and by weaving background color into the form. The cool areas of the legs are composed of colours from the surrounding water.
The four paintings will hang in the home of their grandmother, mementos of the carefree summer days of childhood.
