"...how beautiful she is! She seems to be offering herself as her great gift to the world." 
Barbara Branden

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Venus was one of the most enjoyable paintings to start with and one of the most scary to complete. The original model, Anna Moody, is an exceptionally beautiful woman, stubborn in the same way that I am, and very generous with sharing values.

The theme of Venus, has a very long, very famous legacy, in which some of the greatest names in art history have painted her, such as Botticelli, Titian, and Velazquez. Combine that legacy with the with the general understanding that Venus can't be any woman - she has to have allure, she must be, for all intents and purposes, exceptionally beautiful.  When I started, I wasn't too concerned with the last two issues, but little did I anticipate the enormity of the task ahead of me.

The theme guiding me was to create a real woman at the sea who was the first woman to inspire the legend of Venus. A hot August dawn on a Greek Island, a poet strolls along a goat path down the sea shore to take a refreshing swim, and sees, in the first rays of day, a woman who looked as if she had arrived from the sea fully formed and perfect.

There were two elements to the set up: the angle of her head was exactly what I wanted for the feeling of the pose, and the light of the warm sunrise coming from low on the horizon. The combination of her head tilting back and the light coming low at her, make painting beauty very difficult. The light was hitting under her nostrils, a lot like the Halloween ghosts and goblins which shine a flashlight under their chins. Many classical beauties have their heads straight or tilted down, and they are usually lit from above, like on a stage, or lit from behind with a silver lining glow.

In addition to the difficulties I had when setting up Venus, I ran into the problem that all figurative artists must deal with--when you change a mark on a face, no matter how slight the change, you change the entire expression on the face.

I think the elements of the lighting and the position of the face added about 4 months of full time work to the already several year project. I started the painting in 2001 and finished her in 2008. All that said, when I was painting in the last 2 or 3 weeks, and everything was falling into place, I felt an incredible lightness of being, and an intense appreciation for how magnificent human existence can be. I would not trade that feeling for anything.

You can view the time-lapse sequence of Venus here: http://michaelnewberry.com/video/video.htm.  It runs a little over a minute.

And you can read a detailed discussion of how I made Venus here: http://michaelnewberry.com/av/2008-venus/venus/venus.html

This Venus is quite an anomaly in the sense that the theme hearkens back 2800 years, yet she conveys the self awareness, self esteem, and beauty of a modern woman. A similar thing can be said of the technical execution--figurative art goes back 30,000 years, yet I found modern ways to handle the color, the light, and mood of this work.

The original Venus is also available.