On a recent vacation I took, I had the chance to visit an absolutely incredible series of libraries that inspired me greatly!

Of particular note was a very old library founded in the mid 1800’s which was absolutely stunning. The ornate decorations surrounding the book shelves, the tasteful Victorian style lamps that illuminated the space, and the antique portraits of the library's founders, benefactors, and notable literary figures really left my imagination racing.

And so I sat down to start work on a portrait for Ardent with the goal of it being worthy of hanging alongside these other benefactors of the arts! I soon realized that I’d bitten off far more than I was expecting to have to chew, though, and this portrait that I assumed would be fairly straightforward ended up taking me nearly 70 total hours, from rough sketch to fully finished painting, across more than a week of working off-and-on with whatever spare time I had.

I have absolutely no good answer for why I thought it’d be a good idea to hand paint repeating wallpaper pattern… that nonsense alone took me an entire afternoon to build up enough layers of paint for the design to read clearly!

But it was all worth it, in the end! I’m thrilled with the end result, here, and I doubt I’ll be making more paintings like this any time soon!

-Painted with acrylic paint on illustration board.

"You can see a behind the scenes look at this painting here!"