Seated Woman

This is yesterday's painting at Anne Saitzyk's figure workshop. The workshop inspiration was Matisse, though clearly I was heavily influence by some Chagall stained glass windows I recently visited. (The windows are in a church in Mainz, Germany. They're the only church windows Chagall did--at least according to the church's literature.)

I painted from life on a 16"x20" canvas. The canvas was white, and I wanted a lot of texture and color, fast, so I started with globs and smears of several colors of acrylic paint, which I then rubbed, scratched and otherwise abused to form my underpainting and background. Because I wanted to be able to paint over part of this in oil paint, I was careful to remove enough acrylic paint over that part, so that that area had enough time to dry and let me oil paint during the 3 hour session. (You can paint over acrylic in oil, but trying to mix acrylic and oil or paint acrylic over oil leads to grief.)