Reclining Nude Woman

"Reclining Nude - Bella Italiana" (16"X20", Oil on Canvas, $650)

I like this one quite a lot. It's another one-night painting, but the results speak for themselves. I liked the lighting, and the model was quite nice. I also liked that the red backdrop, which when combined with the corner of the wall and the back of the room beyond the corner (here expressed as a dark green void), looked like an Italian flag hanging behind the model. I liked it enough to base the title of the painting on it.

This was painted quickly, wet-in-wet, and I've always liked the way that technique looks. With oil paint, you can use thicker paint, laid down properly, to cover and correct improper aspects of your painting. also, you can use the wet edges of two adjoining colors to combine them in ways that can't happen with wet-over-dry applications.

The instructor of this class was not one of my favorites. He came after my favorite one had already left for Chicago. The instructor at this point apparently liked eating fish for lunch, and then smoking cigarettes to cover the fish-smell, and then chewing gum to cover the cigarettes and fish. None of it worked, except for the fish and cigarettes, which I could always smell.