Portfolio > Portraits

This isn’t the way I paint at all. But I’ve been working on an oil of the string quartet my dad used to play with back in his days in the orchestra and it just wasn’t working. It was dull and lifeless. Then I remembered a painting I saw once, I think it was by Leroy Neiman of Charles Mingus with flashes of light for the bow and too many limbs, like an Indian sculpture of a dancer. So I decided to try something similar starting with a photo of my dad playing his cello in his mother’s dining room when he was a teenager. I even made the face look like him, a rare thing for me. It’s weird, but I love it. I don’t remember my dad smiling when he played - I barely remember him playing at all - but this really is his smile.