Portrait painting

My name is Deborah Sacon and I've been painting and drawing more off than on for 30+ years. During the school year, I teach English and summer is my time to paint. It's taken me all this time to realize that I really need to paint to keep my soul full of life. Chronicling my paintings, I hope, will allow me to see growth in my work. Keeping a blog is brand new to me and feels pretty self-indulgent, I am self-conscious as I write this, but do so hoping that other artists, like me, will find me and participate in the conversation about making art.

In June, after having made my first painted portrait--what felt like the first portrait that I ever painted--I determined that I need to study a lot harder if I want to make REAL portrait--the sort that breathes life, that resembles the subject, is painterly and beautiful.
I'm calling "My First Portrait-ever" the one that I did of Julia and Augie ("Julia and Her Best Friend").
Being a watercolorist and landscape painter and not using oils or acrylics kept me away from the portrait as subject for the most part. I created a small egg tempera sketch one time, of a girl with a lantern, copied from a Sargeant painting, and posted here.


So I've been painting portraits with acrylics and I'm learning a lot after not having drawn faces--or figures--in about 20 years! I can remember drawing Kim Kincaid in pencil and how I worked FOREVER to get her likeness correct. Were it not for the teacher, I don't think it would have resembled her. One day, I'll look for that drawing and post it here.

I have a few finished portraits of animals to date and 3 portraits of people in the works. Some that I call finished, don't feel finished and certainly are not publishable, as in the finished sense. For my purposes here, I'm concerned with process, not product anyway.

My best works seem to be animals--not surprising since I painted cows and horses when at UMASS in the Fine Arts program. Maira, my neighbor's dog, is my favorite painting so far. It's bitter-sweet to look at the picture. I gave the portrait to Maira's owner because Maira is sick and I wanted him to have a picture of her healthiest summer. She loved being photographed that day so the painting has the life she has.