Yes, She Paints Dogs

Animals don't like to pose for a picture, and this is what distinguishes animal portrait painting from human portraiture. Capturing the animal's attention the entire time is a challenge for an artist. An expert in this particular field is a female artist of Wilmington. She is a member of the famous Delaware family. Her grandfather, a painter, created sea and landscape paintings which won the approval of the public. By the time she was age 3, this female artist began to paint as well.

Even then, she drew mostly animals. Two years after she had her one child show at the local library at the young age of 10, she was already illustrating children's books. She got to learn how to dance a number of different kinds of dances because of the help she had been getting from her Philadelphia teachers. She did solo dance routines for several years and was known for a very convincing death scene in one of her shows.

Of all the animals she has painted portraits of, what interests her the most are canines. The way she starts working on a dog's portrait sparks interest. She does as many sketches of the dog as she can while the owner keeps the dog still.

Her pencil strokes are a flurry of movement over the sketchpad as she seeks to find which pose works best for the dog. She talks to the dog and compliments him while she is doing this. She uses all kinds of props, even tidbits of food to hold the animal's interest. She makes a request from the owner of the dog for photographs that may be in his possession and asks if it's possible to make copies of some of them for her collection. Next she collects three snips of hair, one each from the tail, ears and tummy, so that she can match colors. These snips she files under each dog's name.

She decides on a pose and a composition with the perfect background to use for the photograph. The latter is chosen based from the type of dog or animal. For the portrait of a Chesapeake Bay retriever, for instance, she sat in a duck blind doing sketches to obtain the necessary realism.

She thinks that animals, just like humans, can form their own opinions. This was proven by a damaged painting which had been chewed upon by an American pointer who seemed to show disgust for it. It was most likely a terrible painting if, because of his reaction, he had to be given serious medical treatment.

For a portrait that either shows a beagle or a basset, she puts in a paw print to blend with the scenery and adds on the back the kennel club's identifying symbols. Her own dog helped in even creating abstract backgrounds. Animals don't frequently show cooperation. Because one model left with one of the female dogs, portrait painting was stopped for the day. Not so ordinary things seem to take place when the painting of an animal's portrait is being made.

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