Keith, 18"x14", oil on linen

Keith is a new member of the club who joined last week, and he agreed to pose for the group in this week's vacant slot. I see him 4 days a week in my class, but once we set the pose I realized how prominent the underlying structure of his head was–clear cut planes of the head, rugged contour of the jaw, broad forehead with pronounced brow ridge and frontal prominences–general characteristics that are often associated with the northern Europeans. He reminded me of characters from the paintings of the great German-American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker. When I asked him later about his ancestry, he said he is German-Norwegian.