A Nice Little Earner

A very good friend of mine commissioned me to paint this 12x12 inch portrait of his son, which I completed soon after "En Dios..." last month. It earned me some welcome pocket-money, and this makes it my first success since I began my life as an artist!


On the odd occasion when I picked up my brush after leaving university my painting style still showed the influence of van Gogh, as this still life of a Swiss zupfe bread shows. Although I liked the results - I am still very fond of this picture - I felt a need to break this habit. Up to this point I had made the short, brisk strokes using the side of a "short-bright" hog brush. To change this I just started using the flat of the brush instead. The following portraits of James and Javier were the first pictures that I painted using this new "revolutionary" technique.
















It was not a huge advance, I grant you, but I liked the sense of spontaneity that it lent the painting, and at the very least it made me pay more attention to changes of tone. It was a style that I pursued, not always successfully, until fairly recently. The portrait of my friend's son, as well as my work on Ecuador, shows a mellowing of this approach.

Stephan Fullagar - The Paint Brush Diaries