Portrait of a Young Woman

Oil on wood, 12 x 9 inches (31 x 23 cm)

Before the session began I had a conversation with another artist at the open studio about the drawings he was doing, which I found kind of interesting. He doesn't have a website, or I would post a link, and the drawings are hard to describe, but they are very good and somehow unusual. This artist, Tom, says he keeps in mind the space around his subjects as he draws them and not just the figure or building or whatever he is observing. The other day he was working on a beautiful little drawing of the building across the street in the minutes before the session started, and he says he was not only looking at the front, one side and the roof of the building, the visible parts, but also envisioning in his mind the back and far side and all the other parts that were out of sight. He is a teacher and sometimes tells his students to imagine they are like a fly buzzing through the space around their subject. Well, this is a mind trick that has sometimes happened to me as I am painting, my brush becoming a flying insect, and it usually means the painting is going well.

With these thoughts in mind after talking to Tom, I began the painting above with the notion that my brush tip was a little fly buzzing around the model's head, and in the process almost built a three-dimensionsal model of her head in my mind. I think this helped to create a convincing rendering of an object in space.