A Portait of and for Adam

Back in January I made mention of a project that I'd wanted to do for some time but had been putting off because it was hard. What made it hard was that it was a portrait of my friend, Adam, who passed away in 2008. I wanted to make the painting as a gift to his family but after a false start a while back I came to the conclusion I should just wait until the time felt right. Well, that time came and I was able to give the painting to Adam's family a few days ago. They were very happy to see it, which in turn made me feel happy. And that's all I'll say about that because I don't want to cry.

Something I really enjoyed about painting Adam's portrait was rendering his hair. I find painting or drawing hair is a little like doing a whole lot of mazes at once: you follow a strand or lock of hair through a tangle of other stands and locks to see where it ends up, and if you do that with enough pieces of hair, enough times, eventually you have a layered and hopefully three dimensional looking head of hair. In the photograph that I used, Adam's hair is such a beautiful rich colour that looking closely at it is rewarding because you start to see the incredible variety of hues and tones. I find photographing watercolour paintings really tricky because when I do it, the colouring and layering never quite comes out the same as in the original, but as I hope you can see, Adam had some seriously vibrant hair-- and for those who knew him, the personality to match.