Portraits in Elegance

Diana Neville Knowles is a world-famous portrait artist who lives here in the Flathead Valley. In a professional career spanning over 65 years, she has done portraits of 18 presidents and numerous celebrities, a portrait of Pat Nixon that hangs in the Smithsonian and a portrait of me. Perhaps her pace has slowed from the 16 hour, 363 days a year schedule of her early career (she took Christmas and her birthday off), but she’s still going strong. And of all the portraits Diana has worked on, I’m most impressed by the one I did under her tutelage.

Diana and I met when I bought the building that housed her studio and put her out on the street so I could turn the building into a restaurant. (Yes, the transaction was a bit more amicable than it sounds.) But I really got to know her a couple of years later when, faced with an impending wedding anniversary and no appropriate gift in mind, I threw caution to the wind and bought his and her reservations in Diana’s upcoming portrait class.

It was a leap of faith, as I was no artist. But my wife Carolyn and I decided to do portraits of our two kids. I would do Chloe and she would do James. And thus, for a fraction of the cost of one professional portrait, we’d have portraits of our kids, four days of quality time together, and bragging rights as we showed our works of art to friends.

Work began on a winter morning at Diana’s home studio just off the Swan Highway. She had asked that we bring color photos of the kids, each at least 8 by 10 inches in size. The size turned out to be important because the first thing we did was draw grids on the photos with lines an inch apart. When faced with students, many who (like me) can’t draw, it seems the first step in overcoming that deficiency is to break the task into manageable subtasks. And it turns out that when you divide the big picture into a bunch of small blocks, the task is reduced from drawing a portrait to outlining a few contours. Surprisingly, even I was able to master it.

Outlines done, it was time to begin adding the color.

“Monster colors,” Diana explained.

These bright colors such as Prussian Blue and Cadmium Red, form the base color layers that bring a portrait to life. She calls them monster colors because of a young subject who saw his portrait at this early stage and refused to sit any longer, claiming she’d made him look like a monster. It took the gift of a model boat costing half her commission to get him to return to the sitting.

Anyway, we followed Diana’s advice in choosing the colors. And as the outlines filled the grids and the colors filled the outlines, portraits began to emerge. First the broad strokes, then the details. And suddenly, Wow!

I didn’t like the color of Chloe’s dress. In fact, I didn’t like the dress. And I didn’t like the look with the drink in her hand.

The solutions? Pretty simple, actually.

Start by leaving the glass out and using a different color for the dress. And changing the style of the dress? Well, that took a little direction from Diana, but except for a couple of sample strokes here and there, I still did it myself.

Then came the teeth. I’ll have to admit that to one not used to portrait work, the attention to detail can get a bit tedious after three days. And how hard can teeth be? They’re just blocks of white with shadows in between. Right? Diana’s look was a pretty clear answer as she sat down and repositioned a few teeth to be more in line with the photograph than my picket fence approach had been. A couple dots on the eyes to indicate reflections and “voila!” My daughter appeared on the easel, looking for all the world like she’d been painted by a master.

The portraits hang in the foyer of our home, centerpieces of conversation to all who visit. And I am now an accomplished artist. Well, maybe more of a one trick pony. Because the experience has taught me that, even if I can’t draw, I can create art. But it’s also taught me that I do not have the patience to spend days creating it. It was, however, an experience that would have been on my bucket list, had I known ahead of time to put it there.

Operating under the business name Portraits in Elegance, Diana continues to create portraits and to teach classes. For more information, call (406) 871-2770.

David Vale retired from the world of psychology and statistics and now owns the Pocketstone Cafe in Bigfork. Prior to meeting Diana the only recognizable face he’d ever drawn was that of a clock.