Leticia, oil on canvas board

Sometimes I like to do a grisaille in order to focus on drawing and observation. It gives my eye a chance to rest and get back to the basics of classical realism, which is the foundation of expressionist art.

My most recent painting of Leticia started out as a conventional black and white portrait, but then I stumbled upon the work of Rob Sheridan who, according to his website, creates images by disrupting signals through analog tape and display equipment, not with Photoshop.

As a technophobe, I'm still not sure how he does it, but I do like the abstract effects of glitched images spliced with blank passages, and so I thought I'd try to incorporate some of his ideas into my painting. And so out came the masking tape and palette knives and my portrait morphed from realism into something a lot more abstract.

I could get closer to his concept by straightening some edges and perhaps darkening the grays but I think I'll leave this as is. For a related discussion, click here.