Maddie

Maddie
oils and acrylics
8" x 9"

This is Maddie.  Her owner adores her, and the painting was commissioned by friends of his to be given as a gift.  Maddie's owner is a member of the armed forces and has done tours of duty in all our "fun" theaters....  His history of valiant service to this country was the inspiration for the portrait's backdrop.  I used some of his medals to come up with the pattern in the background. 

 I was loosely thinking of Blinky Palermo's paintings at the time.

Blinly Palermo at Dia Beacon

I was also told that Maddie can be a rambunctious dog; so from the pictures I was given, I chose the one that best expressed that.  In that particular picture, Maddie is sitting on a grass field full of clovers, hence the clovers in the portrait.  Maddie might not understand about medals, or the bronze oak leaves attached to them (not depicted on the painting), or Blinky Palermo; but I am sure she knows all about clovers.  Also, I chose to paint the clovers because I was thinking of how lucky Maddie and her owner are to have each other. 

I've been painting these pet portraits for a while, and in another blog of mine I have expressed a certain trepidation about doing them because of the amount of time it takes me to let go of the idea of representing the pets photographically and just getting on with painting. For some reason I did not encounter that initial barrier while painting Maddie and was able to get into the materiality of the medium immediately.  I am not sure why that was; perhaps it was because the background I chose was so busy and so flat and so very different from previous ones that it loosened my preconceptions. Or it was because this was a close-up of a face and the patterns on a German Shepherd lend themselves to being easily abstracted without my paying too much attention to depicting hair too precisely.  Or maybe it was because I used to have a Shepherd whose features are imprinted in my brain, and thus could paint hers, which are similar, more instinctively.  Whatever it was, I had fun with paint!