Expressive Portraits

For my expressive female portraits, I reveal emotion and feeling through color, facial expression and gesture, rather than striving to create a realistic representation. For some of my portraits, I begin with a photograph that I’ve distorted through a photo app to create more movement of line and color variations, which I then free-hand sketch and interpret on canvas. In other portraits, I’m interested in exploring how a theme first expressed through a clay sculpture can be mirrored on canvas. The portraits are not meant to directly duplicate a work created in another medium, but are an extension of a particular idea. I use fluid and heavy body acrylic paints on gallery-wrapped canvas.