The difference between human portraiture and animal portrait painting is that while humans don’t mind posing, most animals do. An artist will have to give in a lot of effort just to keep an animal from getting distracted. This is the expertise of a female artist who resides in Wilmington. The Delaware family are her relatives. She has a grandfather who is a painter famous for his collection of sea and landscape paintings. By the time she was age 3, this female artist began to paint as well.
Even then, she drew mostly animals. By the time she was 10, she had her own show at the local library, and by the time she was 12 she was a children’s book illustrator. She studied all types of dancing with all widely known Philadelphia teachers. She continued to do solo dance for a good number of years, one of her most memorable performances being a death scene where she accidentally took a mouthful of kerosene from a lamp.
Painting portraits of dogs is what interests her most out of all the other animals she has made portraits of. You would be fascinated watching her start a dog’s portrait. As the owner helpfully tries to keep the dog still, she is already drawing several sketches on her sketch pad.
Her pencil flies over a sketch pad seeking poses most characteristic of the particular model. In the meantime she is constantly talking to the dog, telling him how beautiful he is, what a good dog and so forth. She uses all kinds of props, even tidbits of food to hold the animal’s interest. She also requisitions all the photographs the owner has with the request that she may make duplicates for her own collection. Next she collects three snips of hair, one each from the tail, ears and tummy, so that she can match colors. These snips she files under each dog’s name.
She decides on a pose and a composition with the perfect background to use for the photograph. The kind of dog or animal used in the shot will be the basis for the selection of the latter. She sketched her surroundings as she sat alone in a duck blind to capture what she needed for the portrait of a Chesapeake Bay retriever.
She says that animals can be judges, just like humans. An American pointer proves this point when he crept up behind one artist and tore her painting apart with his teeth. The medication he had to take afterwards was so much it makes us think that the painting really was ugly.
For portraits of beagles and bassets, she puts in scenery and a paw print and then proceeds to putting the symbols of the kennel club on the back. She even made abstract backgrounds, done with the aid of her own dog’s paw. Most of the time, animals don’t agree. A whole day’s worth of painting was wasted when one of the models left with one of the female dogs. While this may seem natural, it also seems that the unexpected can be expected when painting an animal’s portrait.
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Tags: Art, artist, artwork, Dog Portrait, drawings, paint, painting, photo, photos, Portrait