Betty Lin
16" by 20"
watercolour

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This commission was painted posthumously which is always a challenging and sensitive undertaking. Betty Lin was a very loving mother of four daughters whom she referred to as her four little birds. She had immigrated to Canada as a young woman and was very proud to call herself a Canadian. I worked with Betty Lin's daughter who commissioned the painting, to develop a means of communicating this through symbolism. We decided upon the negative shape maple leaf motif for the background to indicate Canada and the four birds painted negatively as symbols of her daughters.

The actual portrait itself presented a whole different set of challenges. There was no one photo which showed Betty Lin the way the family wanted to remember her. We settled upon three separate photos: one showing this facial expression but with her hair pulled back; a second photo with her hair styled as in the painting and a third photo with her wearing this dress. I combined the elements from all three photos for the finished painting. This is probably the most technically challenging commission that I have undertaken but the finished painting was well worth the effort.