you are visiting Gordon Collett's artist site, www.muralartist.co.uk for murals, trompe l'oeil, portraits & illustration

"Mastering the Art" on Sky Arts, Sky channels 267/268.

In each episode of "Mastering the Art" John Myatt will teach three artists from differing fields and backgrounds the techniques and skills to create their own "masterpiece".
Sargent was famous for his fast and aggressive style of painting. We had 20 minutes to decide our layout, draw the figure and get paint all over the canvas! The brush stroking was very vigorous, literally attacking the canvas with fencing moves. The easels were rocking. On a bigger scale this would have been more effective, because this small canvas meant that some of the more vigorous strokes would miss their target a bit. Still John was very complementary about my painting and I gained some useful painting experience (in fact, my first and so far only painting lesson, as I am self taught). John was right in that extending the dress off the bottom of the canvas would have made the figure look more elegant, and then being an exaggerated stylised form cancel out any other irregularities of the drawing. But I got into painting the frilly bits...
The actual painting time came down to about three and a half hours.

Executed in acrylics on canvas, completed August 2007.