My friends pictured within....

Not many words, just some wonderful portraits of musicians. Artist June Mendoza has commissions that include members of the royal family, prime ministers, businessmen and sportsmen. Her mother was a musician, and brought the young Ms. Mendoza into contact with an artistic circle that included the De Basil Russian Ballet Company. This gave her a love of the arts that is reflected in her many portraits of leading figures from the music, ballet, and opera worlds.

Working in oil paints on canvas by natural light, she uses an extensive palette of almost twenty colours due to the complex demands of realising flesh tones. The portraits require up to seven two hour sessions working straight into oils. June Mendoza says creating one of her portraits "involves gut feeling, experience, and the particular demands of the subject."


A blog is not the ideal vehicle for showcasing paintings. So I urge you to visit her excellent web site which has many more wonderful portraits on it (the young Colin Davis is particularly striking), and from which all the images on this article are linked. (These are quite big graphics, so apologies to those readers who do not have the benefit of Broadband, and find them slow to load.)


Portraits above are, of course, Michael Tippett, Antal Dorati, Paul Tortelier and Sir Georg Solti. The title of the post is taken a booklet published by Novello containing Elgar's own notes on the subjects of his Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma ) op. 36

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