While I wait on my partner to be able to take a ref photo with me for to finish page 136, I decided to start on another self portrait. I've been watching a British show on YouTube called, "Fake or Fortune" which involves to British celebrities trying to track down provenance of questionable paintings. For the most part, they tend to prove that these lost paintings are indeed by who they're supposed to be. They were working on a portrait by an artist I did not know named Thomas Lawrence. I decided I liked his work and ordered a recent book on his work. One of the portraits, of Arthur Atherley, caught my attention. Since my hair is currently that long, I thought, "Why not try and replicate this portrait's pose in my own style?" So I've set out to do just that. 

There is something stately about these old formal portraits. While they don't have poses I generally like to do myself as I find them a bit too stiff for modern portraits, I thought some of the humor might come through if I just mirrored this while dressed in current day stuff. So I pulled my leather jacket, gloves and hat out of the closet and took some photos. It was a lot harder than I thought to get a post that worked, partially as the pose in Lawrence's is messed up to say the least. That cocked arm would have to be broken to get it at that angle, let me tell you. My guess is that the head and body were either done by two different people or done at different times. After ten exposures, I finally got what I wanted, though more heavily shadowed.

Last night, I set up the grid and worked on the body. The face was left purposefully indistinct as I knew I was going to do an inset, drawing the face in much more detail, larger, to be inset later. I might even play with "painting" the face at its original size then shrinking it, which will make it obviously different than the body when I finish it, not entirely unlike the original painting. I haven't decided on a final treatment of the background yet but it will be similar to the one above. Did the face tonight. Will try and work on this over the weekend but it being launch week at the store, I don't know how much energy I'll have.