Three Women in Red

Three women in red
Oil on canvas
60.9 x 76.2 cm (24" x 30")

Time to leave politics behind (sometimes it overwhelms even art blogs) and show you my Three Women in Red.

The painting is hard to photograph well - the faces are either too colourless or too pink whereas in reality they are flesh coloured. Perhaps that is something to do with all the red in the picture.

I looked at a lot of 18th Century paintings to see how they achieved realistic skin colours and took from them the idea of brown as a background colour. The colouring has given the painting an 18th Century feel to it I think, even though the clothes are obviously modern. The dark brown background has quite a lot of lemon yellow in it, though you would never guess.

The painting is in oil. I paint oils outside which means that all my oils are painted over summer. I chose oil as I wanted the faces to be instantly recognisable and that takes some fiddling. Acrylic paints dry too quickly, especially in summer.

This picture shows the faces as they developed (click on it for a bigger view).

Even without faces the women were recognisable, so perhaps all the fiddling was not really necessary.

Developing painting