No doubt, I should have posted this at the beginning of the month. Because, like many of you, I’ve been watching several of Joan Crawford’s movies on TMC which has featured her films in January. All the way from her silent movie days, up to the great Mildred Pierce and to her final film in 1970. She had an amazing mix of soft and sexy yet a hard as nails toughness that few actresses could ever bring off.

I painted this portrait for a client last year. Portraits are tricky. Especially with an iconic woman such as Joan Crawford. In this one I used an old trick the great painter Ingres used, which was to take the dominate features of a person’s face and mirror them in order to create an idealized portrait. The odd thing is that, more often than not, it looks more like the person being painted than a dead-on accurate portrait. My guess this is because, in our mind, we focus on the dominate features.

Hope you enjoy the portrait. Click on the image to see an enlarged version.