Do It For The Kids

My latest painting. Sort of a thematic continuation of the last one I did. At least insofar as the subject matter is similarly derived from a movie still (i.e. a scene from Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men). Again, I wanted to supplant the importance of the image's original context with a greater sense of painterly atmosphere and narrative ambiguity.

Untitled, 150 x 120 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

This is the largest painting I've worked on to date. It was a lot of fun having so much space to move the brush around, but of course that also meant that I had to fill it all. A couple of nagging issues -- I had trouble rendering the female character's face given that I wanted the emphasis to be placed on the body language in the piece. I'm thinking that I'll go back in and add a little more darks to it. Likewise, I still have to properly render the hand just to the right of the central figure's head. At the moment, it looks like a minced hamburger patty.

While I'm griping, I'd like to also add that this isn't the greatest photograph in the world. The back wall isn't quite that acidic looking in real life; it's a lot cooler and more subdued.

Ah, well. I'm going to go back to the studio right now to fix all this. So hopefully that'll mean that a follow-up post is shortly on the way.