The freedom I enjoyed while painting the last sketch in August encouraged me to keep experimenting along the same path. I began September by completely abandoning human references. My logic was simple: if I didn’t have a photo to lean on, I could concentrate on artistic expression. Too often, when I started a portrait, I had ideas beyond likeness and accuracy, but as the work progressed, those ideas got lost in the pursuit of a “correct” painting.

I began with two portraits of traditional Japanese women, aiming for an atmosphere of softness and antiquity. Next came two modern women, with a focus on expressiveness. Here are the paintings:

To some extent, I think I achieved what I set out to do—especially in the paintings of the modern women. Looseness has always been difficult for me when a photo sits in front of me. But these exercises also revealed a problem: without a reference to a real person, my “inventions” tend to drift toward the generic and idealized. If I kept going this way, the future paintings might all start looking alike.

So in the next piece, I returned to reworking an actual photo reference. While I liked the result, the painting tightened up compared to those done without references.

Then I tried something in between. I didn’t use a photo, but I did use a face I know very well. Instead of inventing features from scratch, I largely followed what I thought was me (with plenty of upgrades, of course). The result was also somewhere in between. It’s not as loose as the invented portraits, but more relaxed than those painted from a photo. And to be honest, I really like my new look.

One more thing delighted me in these experiments: I’ve been thinking and tried in recent years about returning watercolor (without abandoning oil). In some of these works, I managed—at least partly—to capture the fluidity of watercolor I’ve missed so much. It’s not perfect, but it’s got me excited to keep playing around.