LINDA H. POST FINE ART

When I get to this point in a painting, it's time for me to decide where the boundaries of the finished painting will be. Since the canvas is pinned to the wall, and the size of the canvas is larger than the painting, I often paint outside the edges that were the original borders. It takes about a month for the stretcher to be handmade to my specs and shipped from California. So I have to make my best guess in advance as to the finished size and go ahead and order the stretch

The sky is still red. In order to create the sky-blue-pink I see in my head, it's important to work on everything that juxtaposes it. That way, I can work back and forth between figures, ground and sky. There are always adjustments. Do the heads emerge strongly enough from the background color? Does the sky give a feeling of infinite distance? How do I make the tents almost ethereal, blending with the sky, but still real? Lots of questions. The bonfire on the beach is coming

I often come back to the same models when I think about a new painting. (Not the birds. I always choose new birds.) After quite some time spent manipulating images of people and places, putting them together, pulling them apart, the composition settled down. Allison and Hannah (who have never been in my paintings together before now) became my muses. This one began with a snapshot of party tents my sister took on the beach in Provincetown, MA. I loved the light, which is alw

Nothing ever goes exactly the way you plan it. It is SUCH a large painting, difficult to measure accurately, and eventually we had to take t

Hands can be as expressive as faces. As a young artist, I noticed that a huge number of figurative paintings - even by REALLY FAMOUS ARTISTS - posed the models with their hands behind them, covered by an object or tucked into pockets. Or the artist simply cropped the painting so that hands were somewhere unseen, off the edge of the canvas. Check it out next time you go to a gallery or museum. That led to a revelation: it's really hard to paint or draw hands. And the message: