Towards the end of week 1, I began thinking about constructing a painting that was different than the open-air painting I had been doing. I was excited by the opportunity to control everything about the painting — the subject, the composition, and the color. I’m not sure where the inspiration came to do a person with wings — I wasn’t directly thinking about the vast history of painting winged people as angels — rather, all of the bird observing in my backyard reminded me of The Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I think humans have a deep infatuation with flying. We dream about it, we create lore about it, we admire — perhaps with a tinge of jealousy — the creatures that are able to take to the skies. Thus, I decided that I wanted to paint a person with eagle wings and two eagles.

The first step was creating my composition. I did a variety of sketches in my sketchbook, though once I landed on this idea, most sketches were variations. I also lay a rather dark gray ground once I decided it would be a night time painting so that it would be gray coming through my paint instead of white.

Overall, I am proud of the process and the product of this painting. Even though I stitched together numerous reference photos, and made it up as I planned it, I think the final rendering is believable enough. I also think this painting was the next step in developing my language of visual expression. I took advantage of the feathers’ form to add loose expressive brush strokes, while with the person I used the smallest brush I had, and tried to preserve the underpainting as much as I could. Near the end of the painting, I really began to feel that I was over-working it, so I stepped back, and am leaving it as is. In my underpainting, I had a stop-watch hanging from one of the eagle #1’s beak. I didn’t end up including this because the paint was still thick and wet near the bottom when I decided to step back. I will revisit the idea of including it sometime in the next few weeks.