Current Painting: Mermaid listening to a Harpist

I am currently busy with 4 paintings, which I am trying to finish in time for my graduation from Georgetown Atelier in 4 weeks.

Indeed. I will be done with atelier education. Caplawza! For lack of a better word.
Here are the beginning stages of one of the paintings. It started with a little tiny drawing for the concept:

Mermaid Thumbnail

The model that was posing at my atelier was the one playing the harp; I added the second character from imagination. My original idea was to have  a mermaid swim to land to hear a story teller read her a story from a book, but I decided to cease this opportunity of having a live model playing the harp to execute the idea. The mermaid is thus listening to music, instead.

There is something a bit unusual about this configuration, since it is usually the mermaid that creates irresistible music for humans to hear, not the other way around. Though these two are just friends, not sirens.

Here is the color study I did for the painting:

Mermaid Color Study

All the while I was working on drawing the harp player and the harp, preparing this rather large canvas and painting the harp player on it.

I recently started on the background and the mermaid on the actual canvas.

Large parts are roughed in and still need to be painted. This project is somewhat fun and somewhat difficult because it involves a lot of inventing.
On some days it feels like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and on other it feels like a lot of fun, where I would work on an area and all of a sudden it would feel real to me, like my paintbrush is touching on a real water surface.

I actually feel that this experience is one of the best feelings art offers – the feeling of the reality of the artist’s mental universe. There’s a moment you hear yourself saying “wow… it’s real!” as if it exists outside yourself.
It’s been a while since I updates the blog, because I’ve been very very busy.  I will likely only update it next when one of my paintings is finished.

Cheers,

-Ifat

Leave a Reply