Keeping His Promise

I’ve not done much painting this year. It’s partly due to having too many other distractions and partly due to the days still feeling too short. But I’m back in the saddle today. I need to do a few more posterised portraits to show off to PAOTY judges when they come visiting this website in February but rather than going for a conventional portrait, I went for this weird subjects.

It’s based on a still from a weird video by Petr Valek, a Czech artist who creates photos and videos of zombies, monsters and things. There’s something about his work that’s disturbing. Maybe the less realistic the costume, the more scary it is. I went for this one because the snowy setting magnified the unsettling nature of the image. This painting should come with an X rating.

With all that snow around, this was always going to be painted with the tundra colours, using my posterised approach. The tundra violet was having one of its brown days today, so I tried dropping some tundra green and tundra orange into it to at least vary thebrowns. The sky wan’t based on the source photo. Instead I just darkened the sky behind any snowy roofs and left it white behind any dark shapes. And that was pretty well it really.

The final painting is disturbing, just as I wanted it to be, and the buildings all look good. It’s let down a little by the violets on the figure coming out too brown and hard edged and by the buildings competing for tension by being too detailed and dark valued. But today was all about dusting off some cobwebs and I do think this one’s worth a place in the shop window, so it’s up for sale here. And it was always going to be named after an Algernon Blackwood short story.