I worked on this extended-pose painting, at Studio Incamminati in downtown Philadelphia, for four sessions of three hours each, but regretfully didn’t finish it, as I had missed a session one week (for those unfamiliar with the process, when allowing for model breaks, each of these sessions were about two and a half hours of studio work time).
I enjoyed doing this painting, and the opportunity to have time one evening a week to focus on portrait work. Like figure painting and drawing, this is an area of painting that I wish I had had more opportunity to study when I was in college and graduate school.
Prior to finding Studio Incamminati or Fleisher Art Memorial, college art classes I took as an undergraduate and later typically did not offer a traditional academic approach to working from the model; by and large, classes were more exploratory, experimental, expressionistic, abstraction, and serendipity based. By this I mean that rudimentary basics of painting representationally were covered briefly, but each of us students were left to our own methods to explore and find our own way to deal with drawing issues, or mixing and applying paint. Little class time was devoted to instruction or demonstration by faculty, we students absorbed much of what we learned by watching each other paint – good and bad alike, talking about the process, floundering and making mistakes, searching the art books in the library, and an occasional recommendation from an instructor. I later learned that this experience was normal and was much the case in other schools, that there were very few schools that offered the kind of representational or figurative art instruction and curriculum I was interested in having, and those that did were beyond my financial means to pay for the tuition.
I learned a great deal in art school and have many friends and faculty to thank for their assistance. But sometimes I regret that I wasn’t introduced to working from the figure sooner, with more instruction and guidance than I had. None-the-less, I am thankful for what I am able to do, and look forward to future opportunities to further develop and refine my skills.