Looking at myself

(study) Self Portrait in Red Chair - egg tempera on panel - 15x20

So I had lots of goals when I began the little egg tempera study. Reading Bonnard I thought about this statement: 'The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.' Patrick took a photo and using that in black and white, a mirror and my intuition I tried to project something about myself. I looked at Bonnard, in particular ' Vivette Terrasse c.1916.https://my-museum-of-art.blogspot.com/2014/02/pierre-bonnard-vivette-terrasse-c1916.html 

I wanted to make the surface exciting but to draw the viewer to my gaze.

Self Portrait in Red Chair - oil on canvas - 40 x 50

When I  finished the egg tempera I primed a canvas with kings blue and used the leftover paints from before Christmas that were still on my glass palette. I think I did that to avoid delay and maybe because I could blame the colour choices on that… mostly though I just wanted to get something down. At first it was really loose but I found that I wanted to do something that felt complete at the end and I didn't know how to do that without getting more explicit. I looked at Bonnard more and I looked at Julie Held. I have worked on this a bit more - the left side of the chair and the wall and the vase all  work better, but haven't photographed it yet.