ON & OFF THE EASEL

News, new work, field notes

A new year’s resolution of mine was to exhibit internationally. As if by magic, my work is heading this summer to Münich, Mexico City, Barcelona and Amsterdam this year. All the paintings are portraits of sorts, or ‘life masks’. Are you ‘painting from life’ if you paint from a life mask? Can we still call it a life mask if the person is no longer with us?

When I first heard ‘Blackstar’ by David Bowie on its release date I understood that it was a valediction. It was also at that moment that I understood I had to paint. Since then, I’ve painted Bowie several times, from both film stills and from the life mask he had made for ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ (which is an excellent book by Walter Tevis, who also wrote ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, made famous by the TV series of the same name). Three of my cast studies of Bowie are now going on show in my first international exhibit this month.

Bone structure defines the fixed points that moor a likeness in portraiture. How useful are the translucent fixed points in an x-ray for doing the same? What’s the optical sleight of hand required to make opaque oil paint on a surface register as a transparency? Does it count as a photo reference to use a radiograph for your composition?

“Photography was invented by painters and chemists who wanted to make magic paintings.” That’s a quote from David Vestal’s excellent reference book, The Craft of Photography. Making magic paintings is something I aspire to, and with that in mind I’ve embarked on a course in portrait photography. Wrestling as I do with photo references for painting I’ve decided to more fully embrace the photograph. Perhaps it will inform the painting in useful ways. Maybe I will manage to make painterly photographs and they eclipse the painting. A total eclipse of the eye? (Lunar/ Solar eclipses are a visual theme I’ve been exploring recently). Let’s see.

Lastly, my new website is live: www.romastauras.com

EXHIBIT | Light Dances With Darkness| Orangerie, Münich 11-22 June

Light Dances With Darkness

Let’s Dance. Three small paintings of mine will be on exhibited in ‘Light Dances With Darkness’, a group show opening on 11.06.26 at 19:00 in Munich’s Orangerie, 1 Englischer Garten, runs until 22.06.25. ‘Blackstar’ is a triptych of cast studies from a life mask of David Bowie. He had two done, the first for prosthetics in ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and the second for ‘The Hunger’, with a fine replica made available by the V&A for their 2013 exhibition. Cast paintings are a staple of the academic painting curriculum, to better understand how the dance of light and shadow over a surface reveals form. Each of these ‘monochrome’ studies was painted with a different chromatic black mix, so in fact they are saturated with color. 

One of my resolutions for 2025 was to exhibit internationally.  It seems fitting that my first showing abroad should have come about via friends from Qvarantine in Menorca. Thank you Brigitte Pruchnow for the kind invitation to show work alongside other artists I’ve come to know and love, and others from around the world whose work I am keen to discover. 

SAVE THE DATE | Earth Lines Art Retreat | Coja, Coimbra District 19-25 July

Earth Lines

This summer, I’m thrilled to be leading “Earth Lines” – a week-long art retreat where nature is both studio and inspiration. Over five immersive days, we will use materials sourced from the environs of Terra Verde to make inks and paints. These we will take back to the landscape to sketch in forests, along streams, and in the charming village streets of Coja, near Coimbra.

Alongside this, an inspiring team of my colleagues will lead journaling, cyanotype, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, and sound healing – all designed to nurture creative flow and presence, to tell the stories that only you can. We’ll conclude with a vernissage and live music, celebrating the stories and artworks we’ve created together in this stunning setting. Write to me for more details or register via the link below or @terraverdeportugal – see you there!

EXHIBIT | Tzopantli | Aveiro, Barcelona, Mexico City, Amsterdam

Luna, Sol

Two portraits of our daughter Jasmine. Interpretations or extrapolations of x-ray images she had made after fracturing her jaw in a road accident (all’s well that ends well, but how overlooked is the mandible among bones! More on that in a future newsletter). The skull defines the anatomical fixed points that are fundamental to portraiture. Would radiographs be recognized by anybody but a radiologist as a specific individual? How to suggest both transparency and form in oil paint? A downright challenge when you consider that an x-ray is legible by having light pass through it, instead of bouncing off its surface. Experiments and contemplations. These two paintings are heading to Aveiro, and from there to Barcelona and Mexico City, and eventually Amsterdam, for ‘Tzopantli’, a group show. Hat tip Ivette Rojo for the invitation. More details to follow. 

NEW WORK | Portrait Photography at IPF| Ongoing

Magic Paintings

”Many early photographers were trained as painters, which helped in some ways, but tended to keep them from understanding that a photograph is not a machine-made drawing but something else entirely. It offers possibilities that are closed to artists who must put the pigment onto their pictures by hand. Photographs often show us important things we didn’t know we saw when we took them.” This again is from ‘The Craft of Photography’, a classic among photo handbooks by David Vestal. I enrolled in my first every photography course with view to improving my techniques for lighting and taking reference photos for portraits I paint in the studio. Taking photographs is rapidly becoming its own thing for me however. Many thanks to Tiago de Sousa for setting me up with a Hasselblad 500C, to Daniel Camacho for the excellent tuition and to my ever-enthusiastic and talented colleagues in the course.

ETCETERA | Films, Books, Music

"Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it" 
― Walter Sickert

Photography and alcohol featured in equal measure on my birthday last month. I was in class at IPF on the evening of my big day, which called for champagne. Or rather, more champagne, as the day had started with surf followed by a champagne breakfast hosted by Flo aka Energy Therapy.

On or around my birthday I was also thrilled to watch a documentary double-header, ‘Becoming Led Zepellin’ and ‘Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii’ on the big screen. Rock Gods in stereo! In the days of my youth, I was shown what it means to be a man: set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Pompeii has also featured in the bedside reading pile, which lately includes SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard. So (un) like ourselves, ‘Ils sont fous ces Romains!’ Scott Samuelson, author of Rome as a Guide to the Good Life would be inclined to agree with Obelix, but there’s a method to his madness - think The Examined Life given the Fellini treatment. La dolce vita, esaminata. I have more paintings of Romans in the works.

Render unto Caesar. The Emperor was by far the most frequent portrait on the obverse of Roman coins. Dead presidents still feature on US coins and bills, but for how much longer? Abe Lincoln is soon to vanish as the penny will no longer be minted from 2026, already worth roughly one fourth the value of the metals used to make it. Will my boyhood penny collection be worth more now that the cent is going out of circulation?

Cryptocurrency gains notoriety as emperors, kings and presidents fade from view. Who or what shall we pay tribute to? As I write this, “Dollar slides towards 3-year low” is the FT headline. Defacing the dollar - does it deepen the greenback’s devaluation, or was it some deeper devaluation that has paved the way to defacement? Questions that relate to a WIP and set the stage for the next newsletter.

What has caught your eye, your ear, your imagination?