Anna Chlumsky

I was watching Armondo Iannucci’s In The Loop, and one of the background players really jumped out at me. Anna Chlumsky held her own in a production all about blistering insults. She must have stood out to Iannucci as well because she got a pivotal role in his follow-up show Veep. She played Amy Bruckheimer, a woman who wields profanity as a weapon. She is fearless. As an actor, she is probably still best known for starring in the My Girl movies, but I haven’t seen those. I watched an odd little thing she was in called Blood Car, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re one of those people who likes film-school-budget horror movies.

For this portrait, I again am working without a sketch. I started out with one of those opinionated brushes, but the color aberration on it made it hard to get the values looking right, so I switched to my trusty dry brush. There’s some aspects of this I like, but the overall effect is unsatisfying in a way I’m having trouble putting my finger on.

One thing keeps jumping out at me when I’ve gone deep on detail, and that’s an impulse to strip it back to simpler shapes. I’m looking, for example, at the warm patch on her far cheek (right side of the image), and thinking it needs something. What if I transformed that whole area into a bolder, cherry red patch with rough brush stroke edges, like a Tyler Crook painting? Would that improve things? It’s something I will probably try soon.