Like Grandfather, Like Granddaughter

What makes animal portrait painting different from human portraiture is that animals don’t like to pose. Keeping the animal’s attention from wavering is a total workout for an artist. One female artist from Wilmington specializes in this particular field. She is also a Delaware, which is a prominent family locally. Her grandfather is a painter who created a collection of sea and landscape paintings which became famous. By the time she was age 3, this female artist began to paint as well.

Animals were what she drew most of the time. After a one man show she had at the local library at age 10, she began illustrating books for children at age 12. Thanks to her famous Philadelphia teachers, she became acquainted with the world of dance. She did dance for a number of years, including a convincing performance which showed her dying.

She paints a lot of animal portraits, but painting man’s best friend the dog is her main focus. You would be fascinated watching her start a dog’s portrait. She makes several sketches of the dog while the owner is kept busy trying to keep the dog from changin his positions.

While she tries to find the best pose that would suit the dog, her pencil just seems to fly over her sketchpad. While she is doing this, she is talking to the dog, telling him he is beautiful and that he is a good dog. She uses props of all shapes and sizes to maintain the animal’s interest. In getting pictures for her collection, she asks permission from the owner if she may have some of his photos of the dog duplicated. By cutting out small tufts of hair from the dog’s tail, ears, and tummy, she can find out the colors to use. These snips are kept for each dog’s file.

Selecting the pose and the composition with a good background is the next step. The latter is chosen based from the type of dog or animal. For the portrait of a Chesapeake Bay retriever, for instance, she sat in a duck blind doing sketches to obtain the necessary realism.

Animals have their own ways of evaluating things for themselves, she says. This was proven by a damaged painting which had been chewed upon by an American pointer who seemed to show disgust for it. It took a large amount of medication to treat the dog after that incident, so the painting must have really not appealed to him.

For beagle and basset portraits, she blends in with the scenery a dog paw print and also puts the kennel club’s identifying symbols on the back. Creating abstract backgrounds was something she and her own dog worked on. There is hardly any cooperation that can most of the time be expected by animals. Portrait painting ended on one particular day when a model decided to run off with a female dog. Unusual incidents always happen, it seems, during the painting of an animal’s portrait.

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