Witchhunt

I agonized over the choice of colors on this piece more than anything I've done over the last year. It was a choice made more difficult by factors that had nothing to do with the painting itself. First of all, Elizabeth spent most of her life as beautiful, and that's a large span of time and styles. She was glamorous, she was a beatnik, and she could manage 70s kitsch. All of the school for different palettes. Plus, there's the fact that she was at her hottest during the black-and-white episodes of Bewitched. My first thought was softly rendered black-and-white, but that soon gave way to thoughts of a limited color or a monochrome palette with hints of pure color perhaps on the eyes or lips.

In the end it was story that won out over style. I thought I could do a much better job of capturing the complexity of her emotions if I had a more natural palette on her face. Although it did cause me pain to walk away from the monochrome blue color composition. I'm going to have to revisit that at some point.