DJ Geribo

This painting is taken from a photo I took at a photo shoot during a week long workshop with artist Carl Brenders. We spent one day at a wildlife reserve taking photos of the various animals as they ran around an open grassy area. Most of them were restrained on leashes led by workers at the reserve. I got a lot of photos, many of which I'm still using for paintings.

I decided to show this work in an advanced stage of completion. Although I still have much work to do, you can see I've already worked out the composition and much of the detail. I've set it aside to work on other paintings, giving this one a chance to dry somewhat before I continue.

I love the pose of the pup curling under its mom, his head up to her as they walk along together. I'm going to name it Puppy Love.

When I start a painting I mostly want to cover up the canvas as quickly as possible. But with animals, I want to also get the anatomy correct and so I work out and look at distances: distance from his back right leg to his front right leg, distance from his forehead to then end of his nose, etc. And I really look at the negative space, the space that surrounds the wolf, the grass area in this case. And on the pup, his left ear was curled under mom's chin and his body under her left front leg. And where are the pup's back legs? I really only see one. As I've read in many times when artists speak about painting, paint what you see, not what you know. And seeing is harder than you might think. There is an art book that an artist wrote about seeing like an artist. I remember when I saw the title I thought, now how is that different from how everyone sees? But I have found out that it is true. And it took many years of training to learn this skill. It is seeing exactly how I just described above. Seeing the negative space around your subject as well as the subject itself.

Back to painting!