Animal portrait painting is, not unlike human portraiture except that animals rarely like to pose. An artist has to put in a good deal of work just to keep the animal's attention on her. This is the forte of a Wilmington artist. She is one of those who belong to the Delaware family tree. She has a grandfather who painted a collection of sea and landscape paintings which became quite well known. By the time she was age 3, this female artist began to paint as well.
She found herself drawing animals most of the time. Before she began illustrating books at age 12, she had already had a one man show displaying her work two years before. Philadelphia teachers with famous reputations were the ones who taught her different forms of dancing. She continued to do solo dance for a good number of years, one of her most memorable performances being a death scene where she accidentally took a mouthful of kerosene from a lamp.
Of all the animals she has painted portraits of, what interests her the most are canines. You would be fascinated watching her start a dog's portrait. As the owner helpfully tries to keep the dog still, she is already drawing several sketches on her sketch pad.
Her pencil flies over a sketch pad seeking poses most characteristic of the particular model. While she is doing this, she is talking to the dog, telling him he is beautiful and that he is a good dog. To hold the interest of the animal, she employs different props and sometimes even tidbits of food. She gathers photos of the dog from the owner, and also asks the owner if it is possible to duplicate the pictures for her collection. The colors she would use are determined by looking at the colors of the hair which she snips from the tail, ears, and tummy. These snips are kept for each dog's file.
She then plans out what pose the dog should make and what the background should be. Selection of composition is determined by the type of dog or animal. For the background of a Chesapeake Bay retriever portrait, she went out to a duck blind and made sketches there.
She says that animals, just like people, can pass on judgment. Proof of this can be found in one incident where an American pointer sank his teeth into the painting of one particular artist. The dog had to be given heavy doses of medication afterwards, so it must have been really a bad painting for him to have chewed through it.
For a portrait that either shows a beagle or a basset, she puts in a paw print to blend with the scenery and adds on the back the kennel club's identifying symbols. She was able to even produce abstract backgrounds with assistance from her own dog. Cooperation is not an animal's gift to man in most cases. Portrait painting stopped for the day when one model ran off with one of the female dogs. It may seem like a common thing, but odd and unexplainable things do happen when painting an animal's portrait.
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