Katherine Plumer Fine Art


Dog Art Painting

TITLE: "Bonnie"
DATE: © 2006
SIZE: 40 by 30 inches inches
MEDIUM: acrylic and ink on canvas
collection of J&L Plumer, California, USA


Dog Art Painting

TITLE: "Buckeye"
DATE: © 2006
SIZE: 30 by 24 inches
MEDIUM: acrylic and ink on canvas
collection of J&L Plumer, California, USA


Since these were done as a pair, I'll talk about them as a pair. When my brother and sister in law bought a house in early 2006, I knew immediately what I was going to give them for Christmas--portraits of their two dogs.... very large portraits to fill some wall space! I wasn't sure my super-realistic stuff would fit their sense of style all that well (and okay I admit it, I wasn't sure I could commit that much time to free work...) So I decided more than six months before Christmas that I would do paintings, and I took a bunch of photos of the dogs lounging around the floor while I was house-sitting during the summer. They had to be at least life size, and in fact ended up being considerably larger than life size (yes, this was deliberate). But how to paint... I'd been doing nothing but colored pencil work for so long I felt like I'd forgotten how to paint, and this pair started out with me doing a lot of painting over things I didn't like. And then it started to click... sort of. Truth is I'd never liked painting all that much. I knew from the start I would be adding in some ink, but I hadn't realized I'd be inking them to the extent that I did. That just sort of happened, and the more I did it the more exciting it got. It was the addition of the *drawing* techniques into the paintings that got me hooked, I loved putting all the ink in there!

I wouldn't consider these to be "realistic" in the same sense that my drawings are realistic. But they are absolutely recognizeable as those exact dogs, or at least I think so. Oh it was the cutest thing, when they unwrapped these at Christmas, Bonnie and Buckeye were both staring at the paintings as if to say "who are those new dogs?"


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