Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.
Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?
Developing characters is a collective process, on one hand; it's an individual process on the other. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, as dear Oscar Wilde would say. A great of it, of course, is, you collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.
The British tradition, basically, is to go to the character. And the Hollywood tradition, shall we say, is basically to take the character to the performer.
