Kicking off the big weekend

Well our great weekend started yesterday when we had our regular member meeting from 10-12 at Reddi-Arts, and we had a great turn-out of members to come have coffee and refreshments, and to hear our guest speaker.

The guest speaker was the judge for our show, Andy Kenyon. Though he is shown here with a couple small plein air paintings he did he is known primarily as a children's portrait artist.

He has a traveling set of pastels that he takes on-site when he delivers a completed commission, in order to make any last-minute changes requested by the clients.

He also brought along a pastel portrait of his daughter at age 5, showing a sample of the sort of work he produces for his clients. He told us he works from photos, as children won't sit still to pose, but he goes on-site to meet the child and will take 80-100 photos in order to find that perfect one for the painting.

His daughter just turned 13 on Friday, and he brought a photo of her to use as his demo for the day, though he warned he would not be able to finish by any means, it usually takes several days to complete a head and shoulders portrait.

But it was great watching him work, first laying in his darkest darks.

He gave us lots of great insights into how he works also, and what he uses for creating his art. He also had lots of great stories about how he came to be involved in art, and working with his mother - noted portrait artist Ann Manry Kenyon.

We had 21 people turn out for the meeting, which is the largest turnout we have ever had for one of our meeetings, which seem to average about 15 attendees. It was wonderful seeing so many folks there.

Our business meeting was kept as short as possible (10 minutes, I think that's a record!) so as to give Andy as much time as possible for his demo.

And while he didn't produce a finished product he certainly got enough done for up to get a great feel for where the painting was headed.

After the meeting Andy was off to judge the paintings for our first member show! We are so excited to have had our first show finally take place and come together. Stay tuned to this blog for Andy's decisions, and a report about the reception for our very first show.