Heart and Soul acrylic street musician portrait

                                                                  Heart and Soul
                                                                       12"x16"
                                                                    Acrylic/oil

This is one is ready to be done, the fourth in my street musician series.  I just loved the concentration that this guy has for his music, and yes I think he is making music from his heart and soul.  I also really like the connection between the musician and the cello.  Yes, I do listen to music while I paint.  I am a person who grew up on classical music, my brother is a very talented musician.  I like to listen to instruments rather than keep track of words.  So the music is often soaring in my art room.

I am having the best time at just shutting up and listening to my heart and letting the brush go for it.  After all these years it is about time I guess.   I also look at this like I am kind of sneaking up on it.  This is larger than I have been painting, 12"x16" and it is primarily acrylic but does have some final glazes of oil.  I also did this on canvas board rather than paper, it is a medium texture canvas and going forward I think I'd want to get a finer grade. Also I took the time to varnish it with non-spray varnish, gave it a bit of a thicker coat and boy, oh boy, did it ever pop the colors out.

Also, want to tell the story of the background.  I originally wanted to do another background entirely, but ended us using a board with an old painting, about twenty years ago painting.   So it was a pretty sad painting, and rather than gessoing over with solid white gesso I thought I'd put on ultramarine blue, spreading it with an old hotel key card.  You can see in spots where the underpainting shows through because the ultramarine is so transparent.  It wasn't looking all that exciting and I had some shadows/hard edges where I didn't want them and as you can see I scratched some vertical lines in it while it was wet.  I wasn't feeling any energy in the piece so I sponged on some additional color and let it overlap the musician and his instrument in places.

Thanks much for stopping by and taking a look.