Kastle

Part of a portrait series I'm working on, each piece depicts a specific person of importance to me. In advance, each subject gets an intensive in-depth questioner of approximately 50 questions. The information they supply is then used as a spring board for their specific portrait. Influencing everything from the canvas materials & size to the very imagery & symbolism utilized, imbuing each painting with an individual character as unique as the subject themselves.

Starting with the figure, I drew the basic shape in torn pages of sheet music, fixing them to a foam-core surface by tinting clear coat acrylic brown. Building layers of transparency with the torn pages, I washed certain sections with a Walnut ink before the tinted acrylic fully dried. Once the surface was manageable, I painted the line work & cut the figure out. The background is a second piece of cardboard painted with acrylic washes & spraypaint, the top layer of its skin removed to reveal the corrugation underneath & creating an empty sky.