It's always exciting to begin a new painting. Solidifying the concept can often take months. This new one combines many of the ideas, figures and settings from my series of the past 10 or so years. It is the largest in scale and very horizontal, at almost eleven feet wide!
This is the full-size drawing on canvas, pinned to my studio wall.
Before finalizing the sketch, I created a 12" x 12" oil painting on a wood panel of the masked figure on the left, just the head, to see how it would look.
The whimsical gazebo on the right was on the lawn of the Cape Cod Museum of Art. The red parrot on the upper left is native to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where I've spent some time over the last couple of years. The figures are all young women I've painted many times: Hannah, Amanda, Alison and Sydney. I digitally superimposed the small portrait on the large sketch here.
The complete digital sketch, a photo collage, months in the making, below. As I paint, the narrative will change and deepen, just as it did when I was working on the photo collage. I can't wait!
