An insight into previous Fine Art Work, through exploration and ideas of semi-abstract portraiture.
Welcome to this exploration of my previous original Fine Art Paintings, which I'm really excited to share with you. You'll first see that instead of landscapes and florals, I also love to paint portraits. However, I would rarely just paint a portrait. Instead I discovered that I really enjoyed asking people to squash their faces up and I would then notice the shapes and colours they would make and that would be of great interest to me. It was enjoyable painting the contrast of the smooth lines of the cheeks with the shapes and expressions that the eyes and the mouth would make. Some of these paintings would be about 4ft tall as I loved creating large paintings for dramatic effect alongside other smaller work. They would at times look like sculptural portrait paintings, which I really enjoyed to create.
Sculptural Portraiture
Once I started, I couldn't ' stop, I found this style of working so fascinating and loved experimenting with the various different colours and shapes that I'd be inspired by each portrait. Sometimes there would be a mood or expression that would inspire a particular colour scheme.
I would use soft pastels for a lot of these fine art portraits as pastels are very versatile and blending with the fingers creates a really soft look to the portraits, with also the ability to work on the detail where needed. I also occasionally used acrylics too and enjoyed the vibrant colours that I could use with these paintings using quite often monotone colouring scheme to create the mood of the picture in each individual piece. This type of close up work created a look that was almost sculptural and I was tempted then to make some of them out of clay.
Squashed Face Portraits
I would call these portraits, 'Squashed Faces' and had so much fun creating them. My subjects would quite often be friends and family and we would have photoshoots of various combinations of squashing the face until I found one that would take my interest for a fine art painting. The paintings shown here are a mixture of pastel paintings and acrylic paintings. Many artists have inspired my work over time including Picasso, Lucian Freud, Van Gogh, L.S Lowry.
Exhibitions and Commissions
This thoughtful painting of blue eyes above is created in soft pastel and is one of my favourites. Most of the portrait paintings have now been sold in previous exhibitions that I have been involved with including the Battersea Art Fair in London and Private exhibitions in Chobham Art Gallery, and Daventry Library Art Show. Even though my work now is focussed on meadows, seascapes and abstracts, I still love these portraits and if there is something here that you'd like me to emanate or if you would like me to do a personal portrait for you from a photograph then feel free to contact me on my contact form on the website and I'd be happy to chat with you about a commission. www.annaangelart.com
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