screenshot | Nancy Satin | Contemporary Oil Paintings

I had my everyday life interrupted in a good way from mid-March until this week. I taught a beginner’s drawing workshop, called So You Think You Can’t Draw, in four 2-hour sessions for the Art Club at BallenIsles, participated in a panel discussion for the Art Club that included a 15-minute talk (with samples and slide show) about my “artistic journey” and co-chaired a luncheon for a dear friend of mine who was being honored. All of that meant that I didn’t have much time to paint, so A Garden of Love took forever to finish.

Inspiration strikes in many different ways, and I am often inspired by photographs I see online. I don’t mean that I go trolling for photographs of things I might want to paint; I mean that when I see a photograph that interests me while I’m reading an article or checking notifications on a website, I take a screenshot and save it. In October of last year, I saw a photo of a stained glass torso with an infant in utero that I thought was brilliant.

While I start almost every painting with a monochromatic drawing, my approach to painting this torso was a little different. I began with a simple drawing of her shape, but once I started to draw the flowers covering her breasts, I just set myself free and let my brush travel all over her body to include the leaves and blossoms and color wherever I thought they made sense. My proportions were also slightly different from the original image (she’s taller now…more like me), so I had to correct my version to include more of her body. A bit of a departure from my original inspiration, this was just great fun to paint. I can still see the stained glass in it, but I’m not sure anyone else would.

Artistic license…

I’ve always loved the movies. When I was twelve and had whooping cough that kept me out of school for the last six weeks of sixth grade, I remember watching Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9 in New York almost every weekday of those six weeks. That probably explains why I’ve seen so many of the movies run on Turner Classic Movies before. They weren’t and aren’t all in black & white, but I still enjoy those movies made in the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. The same movie would repeat all day and night, so you could tune in at any time and watch the beginning after the end! Strangely enough, in the old days when I was young, it was common practice to go into movie theaters regardless of showtimes.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I was sitting in my studio doing some work on my iPad and looked up to see the TV on pause while my husband had left the room. I have no idea what film it was or who the actor on the screen was, (now, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t think to click on the guide to find out), I just knew it looked like a painting to me, so I picked up my phone and took a screen shot. Working on two paintings at once these last few months, it’s taken me a while to turn that screen shot into Blue Mood.