Small Figure Paintings

‘Seated Nude I’, 12″ x 10″, oil on linen

‘Seated Nude II’, 10″ x 8″, oil on linen

This is a long overdue post. I have been working on quite a few pieces over the last few weeks, but none of them are quite finished and I don’t want to post them until they each feel a little more resolved (if they ever do). In the meantime, here are a couple of smaller-scale figure studies.

I really enjoy working on this scale for figure paintings. I think they are easier to view and live with than larger studies of this kind. They also encourage me to be more experimental in how I put down paint. Although it’s difficult to see in these (not very good) iphone photos, the paint texture is built up a little more and I’ve been happy to lose and find edges with each layer and stroke of paint. I aimed to capture (particularly in the second of the two pictures) a real sense of luminosity in the flesh, and painting more freely helped this along.