Master at work ...

... Last night, Debbie and I attended a painting demonstration by Nelson Shanks at Studio Incamminati. If you click on the Articles link on the Shanks website, you can read a piece I wrote about Nelson Shanks some years ago. So I have watched him paint before. But never from the very beginning. And I must say it was almost uncanny how the image of the model emerged on the canvas, starting with some broad slashes of grisaille. One particularly interesting thing was that, at times, it seemed to me Nelson had not got a detail quite right. Invariably it turned out he saw the detail better than I had, and by the end of the evening - the demonstration took three hours - I was seeing the model more clearly than I had at the start.
Someone really should make a documentary of one of these demonstrations. This isn't one of those TV painters tossing off a generic landscape. This is a major artist showing how you can vividly represent with paint on canvas something or someone "out there." It is a truly magical experience.