painting women and light

Dear Nicholas,

 

Thank you for taking me out of my comfort zone.... Really! 

After going through your exercise of determining what I was drawn to and finding that time and again it was, strong contrast of light and shadow and figures, the photo I chose to work on was one that I had thought of trying for years but lacked the confidence to attempt (the black and white aspect put me off for one thing).

Your patient, thoughtful critiques done throughout the process were so helpful and pushed me to finally "see" what the light was doing and to go with it. You have given me some wonderful new tools to work with, and I'm excited to find what will come next on this journey of mine.

I've attached what may (or may not) be my finished piece and hope that you might give me one more critique. I kind of just scrumbled (is that really a word?) in the beachy part and worked on the facial likenesses.  So what do you think?  Is it working?  I'm kind of fretting over the background stuff a little.

Again, I thank you for all I've learned from you in three short days and the fun I had doing it. Except for a little bit of visual burnout on the computer screen in day one, I had no problems – and I'm not sure how else it could have been done because it was important to see a huge assortment of material.

Breaking us into small groups to go through and discuss it at our own pace was brilliant, and having you roaming around between us with suggestions and insights was absolutely indispensible to the whole process. All of those little nudges you gave to open our eyes and see, each in our own way and not dictating how we should see. 

You are as skilled a teacher as you are an artist, and I hope I might have the opportunity to take another of your workshops in future.

Sincerely,

Heather