For the past couple of months, I've toiled away at this picture of my wife at the Richmond Night Market. The Night Market is a large open-air bazaar in Richmond, British Columbia that features a thousand different kinds of plastic junk nobody needs and a dazzling selection of barbecued foods on a stick. Illustrated are hunks of skewered fishcake smothered in sweet tangy springroll sauce, yummy!
This picture started out as a photograph. At the time, I thought the photo was a good one: my wife was nicely rimlit by the golden setting sun. When I got the picture home, though, I noticed all kinds of bits that detracted from the quality of the image. There was a lens flare that bloomed on her teeth. The exposure was too low. The composition had a dozen faults that I had missed when I pulled the trigger. At first, I thought I could make the corrections in Photoshop, but a few minutes of dragging around sliders and curves proved that making any gains on this picture would require hours of labour. So, I decided to use the picture as the basis for a painting instead.
I did recomposite my wife into a new multi-layer background that I created by assembling elements from some other photos I took of the Night Market. That's why the light sources don't quite match up. Then I set myself up as a painter and tried to make this picture as portrait-like as possible given my experience level in this sort of work.
This picture has gone through three phases. One phase, I am trying to be painterly with the facial portrait. It's not as well-defined as I had imagined it would be, but I don't think that working it any more would improve my wife's good looks. The other figures in the garish blooms of light have the illustrative feel of gouache. This second phase is not a perfect blend with the rest of the image, but the different style and colour palette do seem to serve to set the background apart from the other elements without needing extra details. The third phase is the rest of the background which exists in a very loose rough form. I decided that adding detail might detract from the rest of the image. It's easy to over-work a piece. The great Masters had a keen sense for the balance of colour and detail that I just barely comprehend.
Today, then, represents for me the point where the picture may not be finished but it can at least be safely abandoned for a while.
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