Bring Your Kid to Work Day

As sometime happens, a painting that started out as somewhat of a scholastic endeavor has ended up being one of my personal favorites. I happened across a photo taken of my son while he was waiting for me to finish cleaning up after attending a drawing workshop at the Grand Central Academy some years ago. I really liked the light and his curious pose, but since the photo was taken in the low intensity lighting of a cast hall and four-year-olds are completely incapable of holding still, the hands and feet were pretty blurred… the foot on the left so much that it had vaporized completely. So I had written it off as "scrap" for a painting. But, after working on this latest chain of small-ish pieces, I thought it would be fun to at least do a little oil sketch. It quickly evolved. I decided to add a couple of large casts behind the figure to break up the space a little and fill out the composition. And, as long as I was making serious modifications, I thought, “why not just drop a prop in front of the vaporized foot?”…so I did. The more work I put into the painting, the more I started to like it. So, I spent some time refining it and polishing it up. Now I’m really glad I did.