{"id":7118,"date":"2026-02-16T21:38:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T21:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/?p=7118"},"modified":"2026-02-16T21:38:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T21:38:18","slug":"portrait-of-craig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/2026\/02\/portrait-of-craig\/","title":{"rendered":"Portrait of Craig"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1998 my son Clint was in the seventh grade when he started bringing his BMX friends over to the house. That was 1998. There was a gang of them including Tony and his brother, our neighbor’s son Jeremy and a few others. They’d build increasingly larger dirt jumps in the neighborhood, sometimes just beyond our property in the green belt. I didn’t think about it at the time, but there were never any girls in the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa was always around of course, and I’m sure some of her girlfriends like Andrea would be nearby. But they weren’t into BMX. As they got better Sue would act as a soccer mom, BMX style, driving them around town to the various skate parks and forested jumps in our 1996 Ford mini van. I went on some of those trips if I wasn’t working. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clint has been around climbing his whole life, but sometime in their late teens, early twenties, he invited Craig to try climbing for a weekend. Craig was a natural and within a few years he, Clint and some of their nursing buddies were climbing at Exit 38 on their own. We all made some trips to Yosemite Valley as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one memorable 14 day trip we met Bretts friend Crystal in the valley. Clint and Sue drove home in his Tacoma while Craig, Crystal and I stayed another week. Gradually, as Clint got busy with his nursing job he cut back on his climbing. I can’t remember the exact timing, but we had a great run of about 12 years. Craig, on the other hand, had a shipyard job with a lot of vacation time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Craig fell in love with climbing. He and Clint still ride the jumps on their mountain bikes to this day. But while Craig does both sports, Clint doesn’t climb rock anymore. He still climbs Rainier every summer, but his sports are the mountain bike, bow hunting and skiing, mostly on Rainier, but also lift skiing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn’t planning to revisit all this history… I started this post to show my latest painting, which is Craig. I guess I felt I needed background since up till now my portraits have all been family. My first portrait was of two of Clint’s chickens. Then a cat, then his daughter Rose and then Clint. Next I did Lisa’s daughter, grandkid number 2. Then I painted Lisa. I thought Lisa’s portrait was my best painting ever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my annual jtree trip…I still haven’t written that trip report…I got some great photos of Craig. My darn iPhone 17 pro almost matches my full frame camera for portraits in good light. Craigs wife Shannon liked Lisa’s portrait and mentioned in passing that she was thinking about commissioning me to paint Craig for his birthday. She has a print of an old portrait I did of Craig by campfire light in Jtree. I didn’t respond immediately to her statement. These days I paint for enjoyment and satisfaction. And I still don’t know how I feel about that. I dislike money between friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long story short I started Craigs portrait by drawing it in pencil on masonite covered with an oil ground. That went fairly well after the usual stumbles. It turned out so good I wished I’d just done the pencil work on good drawing paper. I could have called it done. But as the old saying goes: “In for a penny, in for a pound”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started in on the color I immediately started hating life. I’ve never painted teeth before. The reason ancient painters never did teeth is because photography hadn’t been invented and no one can pose smiling. Being a traditionalist I also never did teeth, preferring to work from life. But no one has time to pose anymore, and it was a great smiling photo my camera had captured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For several days I tried to ease in on the color with non committal washes, letting the strong pencil work show through. I’d fixed the pencil so it was bulletproof. But I was getting nowhere and knew I had to launch into thick paint. For a day I was using the color picker in Photoshop on my iPad to tell me what colors to put where, but that didn’t work. Painting from a photo is not just copying colors. You might as well just keep the photo. No, the whole point of a painting is to bring a portrait to life so it breaths in a way that a photo never can. There is a reason painted portraits are treasured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally I started interpreting the photo colors into something that spoke to me. Soon the painting came to life. There was a moment when I was painting my crazy ass colors and a good song came on my playlist. I think it was “Gimme’ one reason” by Tracy Chapman. I was so happy with the painting I started dancing in my studio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sue knocked on the door and came in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, those colors are awful! His beard isn’t green, what were you thinking? I’ll bet it was all those acid trip that messed up your ability to see color!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before she had come in I’d been wondering about my choices. My daughter Lisa is an excellent judge of my artwork and I’ve always known I can get the straight skinny from her. Here is a text message string to Lisa:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
My daughter is one of my art consultants<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Because I was focused on painting and then building 4 new hand painted and gold leafed picture frames, I’d stopped playing guitar. Or I think that was why. Perhaps my mind only has so much creativity available. I finished the frames today and was pottering around the house and saw my guitar gathering dust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I put on my harp brace and started playing The Rose<\/strong> as a one man orchestra: guitar, harp and out of tune voice. The song dug out some deep emotions of joy and sadness combined that could only happen through performing live music. I feel fortunate to have these talents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Pencil under drawing to work out values<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\"\"
struggling to find the color scheme <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Craig portrait 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My iPhone has a function where I can press a button and it goes grayscale. It’s supposed to reduce screen time by making it less interesting and therefore addictive. I hit it accidentally while looking at his portrait and was stunned at how accurate my values were. Any hue will work if the values are correct.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Painting viewed in grayscale, it still works!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1998 my son Clint was in the seventh grade when he started bringing his BMX friends over to the house. That was 1998. There was a gang of them including Tony and his brother, our neighbor’s son Jeremy and a few others. They’d build increasingly larger dirt jumps in the neighborhood, sometimes just beyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7118"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7130,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118\/revisions\/7130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}