Different Strokes - Diana's companion

I love looking at sculptures. I enjoyed the sculptures in the Louvre as much as I did the paintings. It is such a terrific art to be able to bring something alive from stone. I have so many favorites at the Louvre, the Hermaphrodite quickly comes to mind. I absolutely love it. Whoa! While I love Indian sculptures for their intricacy and craftsmanship, the western ones have a unique appeal too. Like this one of Diana's companion. What a beautiful figure, I loved the dress, her skirt and the folds in it. Among my extremely limited travel experience in India, my favorite spot for sculptures is the Somanathapura temple near Mysore. I was there last year and it was worth all the trouble of traversing through the pathetic roads. The figures just blew me away! Totally worth a visit.

Diana's Companions
Graphite on paper, 9 * 12 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

This is my entry for the ongoing challenge at Karin's Different Strokes blog. Its been ages since I painted a sculpture. Long long ago, about 12 years back to be precise, I did a sculpture in graphite, of one of the figures in Halebid. Though I lived in Bangalore for so long, I never got to visit Halebid which is quite close. So after 12 long years, this was my first attempt at doing a sculpture. I have a lot of photos of sculptures, from the Louvre and from Rome. I am inspired to go paint some of them. We'll see.

Karin had requested the figure to be painted as a whole, without cropping. I have flipped the reference image horizontally though. I wanted to do this as a monochrome initially, with various shades of brown. But when I started sketching itself it screamed graphite, hence the choice of medium :) All the entries for this challenge can be seen here. Most of them aremind blowing, absolutely mindblowing. Have a look.