Updated July 23, see below. The female in the featured image above is the actress Kristy Swanson, known by many for her role in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To me because she is one of the few Hollywood movie stars supporting Trump …
Judging from her Instagram account, she is an overall very pleasant person and a great mother.
Painting all three of these small paintings was educational and expressly intended to be so.
The man depicted is Johan de Witt, more about him and another painting with him at the bottom of this post.
The small painting at the top of the image on the left is not abstract: I never do abstract. It is a detail of a banana plant in my living room. The fact that it may appear abstract at first glance is because of the zooming in. Zoomed in on the amazingly rapid decay of the leaves.
The very first blog post on this website was about this very same plant and based on later observations of it I recently discussed the world of banana cultivation in detail !
The Kristy/Buffy portrait is, in a way, a preliminary. Actually a preliminary of a preliminary. At the same time as the presentation of my book 49:49, I would like to present a painted tribute.
A tribute to the lovely, awe-inspiring Dorothy Milne Murdock to whom I also dedicate the book. She wrote under the pseudonym Acharya too. Perhaps the most important scholar ever.
So that painting HAS to be my very best work, hence more than one preliminary.
Scheduled date for the double presentation: November 23, 2024.
Like almost all my paintings these are for sale. My prices are only partially based on the amount of time I invested and my estimate if I did a really good job. The most important aspect is: can I separate from them?
These are in the ‘category’: okay, but just preliminaries.
Format: A5. Oil Paint on paper. Including frame. € 350 each. All three: € 1000.
The video linked below shows the bigger painting with Johan de Witt. It is based on two works by 17th century painter Jan de Baen. The painting with the two desecrated bodies is owned by the Dutch Rijksmuseum, but not on display because of its gruesomeness. I thought of making a new tribute to this Johan without the gruesime part but first I will make a tribute to that other famous Johan ‘legally’ executed by the Orangists: Van Oldenbarnevelt.
Update
The photo part of modern mobile phones is really fantastic. So much so that Standard mode can produce near-perfect images. But not in this case!
Three things were different. The painting is much smaller than almost all my others, it was already behind glass and I used a special feature: I made a kind of cuts with my palette knife to give a special effect to the curtain. In the default mode that special effect is ‘corrected’, as it were, so the blouse and skirt are almost made part of that curtain!
That ‘correction’ is still visible on the image of the comined photo of the three paintings.
Educational.