Gwenn Seemel is an Oregon based portrait artist with an unusual technique. her colorful portrait images are built up from a series of cross hatch strokes in acrylic, a process she developed from an interest in printmaking.

As you can see from the demo on this page, she starts with areas of color shapes, often with a modernist, geometric feel that often carries through to the final piece, and works up the surface gradually with several passes of hatching and shape delineation.

The end result is often a very graphic surface of multiple marks, a textural array of colors that blend to form the portrait image, as in the detail image above, bottom.

Seemel works from digital photos taken during an hour long interview process in which she asks the subject to talk about themselves.

The image above, top right is a self-portrait.

[Suggestion courtesy of Karin Jurick]

Since I last wrote about painter Karen Hollingsworth in 2006, she has continued exploring her luminous room interiors, which have evolved into “windowscapes”.

Many painters will work to fill rooms with light, but Hollingsworth’s rooms are volumetrically filled with the palpable presence of light and air. Sea air lifts gossamer curtains, through which sunlight slides, scatters and bounces, playing across polished wooden floors and chairs, cascades of linen bedsheets or tablecloths arrayed with colorful fruit.

Light and air almost seem like competing forces, light filling a space like water in a jar, and air stirring it around, moving your eye through the space across the diagonals of swept up curtains.

In the galleries on her site you can browse through her recent archives of windowscapes, along with “roomscapes” with somewhat weightier contents, as well as portraits, still life and commissioned work.

Karen Hollingsworth is married to painter Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled here and here.