Tessie O'Shea Portrait

I generally prefer to paint portraits of men - their faces seem to have more 'character', from my artist's eye anyway. But there are exceptions of course. One is Tessie O'Shea. She was a true performer, with her effervescent and infectious character coming through in her face. If you watch an old video of her and turn down the sound, just looking at her face and theatrical posture is a 'show' in itself - big smile, big jewellery, big performance. What a star she was. And she could play a mean uke too!

Like the Formby portrait, I've tried to get a vibrancy in this painting of Tessie. I wanted to resist the temptation to add too much detail and clutter. Hayward Veal had an exercise where he would try to finish a painting within 10 minutes. This painting took longer than 10 minutes but I still tried to do it as quickly as I could as I feel that urgency and immediacy fits perfectly with the gusto of Tessie's performances.