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Although this painting is no longer available, click here to purchase a museum-quality print.

Josh came to the studio for the first time on February 14 with a duffle bag full of clothing options for a potential pose. Being a fashion design major at VCU, he had many visually interesting ensembles. He brought a flowered shirt that really caught my eye, and it's pale green was similar to a backdrop cloth I had placed on a folding screen. 

 
This 16x12 head study of Josh was painted from life in my studio during that first visit on February 14.  It was probably done in about one hour.  I never got any further than this; sketches often serve the purpose of simply warming me up to other ideas for posing a model. However, this study was helpful in developing the skin-tones in my eventual painting, Joshua's Flowered Shirt. 

12x9, preliminary study for Joshua's Flowered Shirt painted from life in my studio on February 16.

Two days earlier, I had photographed Josh in dozens of poses, out of which came a composition I felt quite strongly about.  Josh was able to return to the studio on the 16th and we re-created one of these poses.....same clothing, same gesture, and similar time of day so the lighting (a north-facing window, incidentally) would be similar.

Josh sat for about 2 hours for this small sketch, which provided me an idea of the over-all color quality of the eventual larger painting.  When used with photographic references,  even the roughest of color sketches is a valuable reference when the model is not available. 

Stages of Progress:

With a couple of oil sketches under my belt, I began working on the larger, formal composition on a canvas sized 30x22 on February 17.  Josh was no longer available, but the decorative elements in the room remained.  I used both my photo references (on a large computer monitor placed at eye level) and my preliminary oil sketches for the face & figure.

I took several photographs of the painting as it developed over the course of  two weeks; below are various stages in the progress followed by the completed work.  I worked on this for about sixty hours, calling it "finished" on March 3. 

     
I'll begin painting any subject pretty much the same way...masses of color/values are roughly blocked into the general interlocking shapes provided by loose contours of the drawing (in this case, thinned oil paint using Windsor & Newton's Mars Violet Deep, which provides the purplish-brown color of the contours).  The photo above captures the first massing of color on top of my drawing, in this case the rather similar warm organge-gold-brown color of both the pants, hair, and the cabinet in the background.

Color massing continues

At this point, you'll see color masses established over entire composition, which can occur quite quickly.

I have taken extra care (and time) to slow down and articulate the face.

 

The painting as seen in the stage above looked very much as you would have seen it for at least 40 of the 60 hours I spent.  The earlier broad generalization of line, value, & color is followed by a far slower period of refining and specificity.  My palette of colors was pretty limited. Gamblin's Oil Colors Titanium White, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow Light, Ultramarine Blue, and Pthalo Green. 

The Completed Work: 

Joshua's Flowered Shirt

Oil, 30x22, 2014

Details From the Painting:

Here are three "zoom-in" shots of the painting to give you a closer look.....

Joshua's Flowered Shirt will be part of my annual solo-show in May.  Although it probably won't happen before the show, I'd love to paint Josh Bigalow again.  With his easy-going personality, he was great to work with, and beyond learning of his fashion & skating aspirations (he is an accomplished figure skater), we discovered a mutual love of film, particularly documentaries.  

Incidentally, after I had chosen his flowered shirt as the costuming we'd use in the painting, he un-selfconsciously told me it's actually a woman's shirt.  He found it at the J. Crew retail outlet where he's employed part-time, and knew he could "make it work" as part of his look.  This seemingly inconsequential, but endearing, facet of the story stuck with me.

While the paint was still wet, I knew I had my painting's title. 

Click here to find Joshua's Flowered Shirt on my website