Sisters and Brothers (Crop of Portrait) as of Oct. 30, 2025

Here is a crop of the painting I am working on, from a photo that I took  of my work on October 30, 2025.  This commissioned portrait is an ongoing project which I am hoping to wrap up in November. I am working from a photo taken during a trip to Disney last spring.  I have been working on it a little at a time.  On Oct. 30th, I cropped the photo of my work and sent it along as a "progress report"to the family, which was well received, I am happy to report.  At this point I was working on the background,  trying to suggest the castle that was in the family photo. And in the photo, the kids are wearing lots of Disney gear and I was trying to decide how much of it to include in the painting.  (You can see the little Minnie Mouse ears roughed in on the little girls)  The client seems happy with the painting so far, including the Disney gear, which makes sense because this a family memory of a specific time and a place that is special to them. For me, as with other portraits, this is a balancing act because I want my portraits to be "timeless".  Which details of the background should I include? What should I edit out of simplify? I have done several other portraits  in which the background or the pose, or the clothing details were very important to the client (ranging from sunglasses and motorcycle helmet to tuxedo and dance floor).  So I my plan is to include "just enough" Disney gear in this portrait to evoke memories of time and place, but also create an image of these sisters and brothers that will stand the text of time.

Sisters and Brothers (Portrait) as of October 4, 2025

Here is the portrait I am working on as it looked on October 4, 2025.  This is a long-running project, a commissioned portrait of four kids based on a photo that was taken during a family trip.   I have been working on it little-by-little, but at this point I felt I was getting there with a likeness of each of the children.  I decided it was time to rough in the background. I thought it was good enough to post here (with parental okay.)  To be continued. . .

Rage of Achilles (Painting)

Here is my finished painting on October 2, 2025. It was time to turn it in for the special "Homer" event at Porter Mill which featured paintings inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey. I wanted to participate in this because the Iliad was one of the first books I read when I began graduate school in Comparative Literature and also because I think the Iliad still has important things to say to us even now..

Over the past year, I have produced several literary-themed paintings, and this painting will be part of that series. My little "literary series" came about by chance because of a number of art shows with literary themes that I participated in over the past year or so. So now I have done paintings related to "Moby Dick", "Alice in Wonderland", "The Scarlet Letter" and a "Midsummer Night's Dream," and now Homer's "Iliad". These paintings are all the same size (20 x 20), and done in the same style. I hope to exhibit them together at some point. And I hope to paint more.

This painting is a representation of the shield of Achilles, but instead of being engraved with fantastical images (as in Homer's poem), it is inscribed with Homer's words: the opening line of the "Iliad," as translated by Robert Fagles.:

"Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls."

So this how my painting looked on October 2nd, the day I finished it. In the intervening days, I had made changes, large, small, and invisible to the naked eye. I added a few layers of gold metallic paint to the border of the shield. I mixed the same paint with acrylic medium so I could add more layers of gold to the body of the shield without obscuring the lettering. And I added some white to the background, using soft circular strokes to suggest clouds in the sky.