reprinted by permission from the December 2002 issue of
The Artist's Magazine (www.artistsmagazine.com)
Second Place - Portrait
Todd Williams
Inner Glow (oil, 12x16)

Portraitist Todd Williams of Siloam Springs, Arkansas, sought to convey a sense of poetry in the graceful gesture, serene expression and lyrical brushwork of Inner Glow. Knowing that he'd eventually juxtapose the smooth contours of his model's face and arms with more active brushwork in the background, he mapped out a space on the canvas for the figure and gessoed around it with a knife to build surface texture.

The figurative portion of Inner Glow was then completed from life in one sitting. After sketching in pencil, Williams painted alla prima, building dark to light. Shadowed areas were left washy, transparent and loose, while the highlights—notably in the model's cheek, neck and blouse—were refined with greater precision and thicker passages of opaque paint. Brisk strokes in the creamy fabric were spackled in with a painting knife and then smoothed slightly with a brush. Given the sanguine nature of his subject, Williams opted for a warm palette with only minor green tints and no blue.

Because oil colors have varying consistencies straight out of the tube, Williams is meticulous about preconditioning his paints with linseed oil to ensure they all spread with the same viscosity. "I want them to feel like cake frosting. The paint should hold its shape, but should also be easy to move around," he says. "This gives me the best control when I'm working wet-into-wet." - written by Jenny Sullivan, a freelance writer based in Annandale, Virginia