Donald Mckay Portrait

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Peter Gutterman

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I found in a book of maritime photographs from the Mariner's Museum, Norfolk, VA, a copper plate photo of Donald McKay. Perhaps America's greatest architect of merchant craft, he worked from the 1840s to the 1870s. He designed more than twenty of America's most renowned clipper ships, including: Staghound, Flying Cloud, Flying Fish, Sovereign of the Seas, and the five masted clipper-bark Great Republic.
Despite the stern countenance of an uncompromising taskmaster (giving the impression that working for him you need only respond with one pair of four words: "Yes Sir! or "How High") McKay was known as a fair and inspiring employer. He got his hands dirty in the shipyard, working alongside his men and they felt treated as family.
I was inspired to do a portrait from the photo as a companion of to the model of the "Flying Cloud" which I am currently working on.
In the painting I wanted to emulate a typical19th c. American portrait, as well as the antique quality of a copper plate photo of the same era. Plus20230930_140708.jpg20230921_152758.jpg20230921_153602.jpg20230914_182138 (2).jpg20230922_151007.jpg20230930_141626.jpg the Byzantine Orthodox Iconography suggested by the stern countenance of the iconic American shipbuilder and the golden background of the copper plate photo.
The painting had to be "constructed" in stages, working from a plan (a few copies of the photo scaled to size 24"X 30") cut up and traced in order to get all the proportions accurately aligned and to scale.20230923_182402.jpg20230924_170434 (1).jpg
 
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I had planned a nice orderly succession of process pictures followed by the finished portrait. :rolleyes:
But the editing Gremlin got into the works.Cautious
But you get the idea.:D
Oh, btw, the bottom of the portrait I left vague because, in the Photo I was working from, that lower portion was obscured by damage due to age. So, in the words of the Immortal Beatles, I decided to just "let it be...'

Well, back to the model...

Pete
 
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When asked: "What is a portrait?' John Singer Sargent quipped " A portrait is a picture of a person with 'with a little something wrong around the eyes.' "
With that in mind, I took my 000000 brush, paints and started tweaking. About six hours later I settled on the final iteration if my portrait of Donald McKay.20231003_145817.jpg
 
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