A Collection of Small Portraits in Oil

Here are some small portraits from the final few weeks of term before the Christmas break. I really enjoyed working on these, trying a few subtly different pigments – Michael Harding’s Warm White Lead Replacement, and Slate and Vine Blacks for example – and thinking about the psychology I wanted to capture. The light on Julian created a fantastic Thomas Lawrence-esque highlight cutting across his eye that I wanted to make a feature of, and I looked for some white on my palette that was just starting to dry and take on the elastic stringiness that is so nice to lay on and mould.

To give a sense of the scale of these, here they are with a few other bits and pieces on my dresser. The framed picture is a very tranquil painting by Helen Simmonds that I recently acquired, and love.