I’ve been looking at other ways of painting  in oils and found an artist I admire, Karen Schmidt. Based in Louisiana Karen is a Fauve Impressionist, which I had to look up. She starts with a heavy base layer, which provides strong, deep colours and then defines edges by painting both positive and negative shapes. This method allows the dark values to be set very early and its then up to the artist to bring light & colour into the painting.

Fauvism seems to draw on primary and secondary colours being used in the purest forms, in blocks of solid colour and strong outlines. Complementary colours are constantly placed against each other but not mixed to produce the overall effect of another colour. Brush strokes are fierce. Matisse was a Fauvist.

I thought Molly would be a great subject to produce a painting based on this method. Karen produces wonderful Dog and Cat paintings so it was a natural subject to begin with. I’m going to continue developing this style for a while and see where it takes me.

Molly disemboweling another toy