Color Field Portrait?

I had an interesting discussion with a local artist on Glenn Brown's work, particularly his use of flat color background. She thought that supports the subject of the painting (see the first figure. I thought his more successful ones using this approach is when the "background" occupies less area on the canvas. To prove to myself that this is the case, I painted the portrait of Madam X shown here in the second figure. I intend to make the "background" competes successfully with the figure itself. Yellow is usually a difficult color to deal with - its intensity depends very much on the neighboring colors. I chose it as "background" on purpose, and see whether I can make it very intense. You may need to click on the figure to enlarge it in order to see the intensity of the yellow.

Rusty's and Snacktime

When I finished "Rusty's Jazz Bar" today, I cannot believe that I worked on it on and off for 7 years!! The original figure was done in 2002 when this native American posed lying down to fit my horizontal canvas. It was a barren naked figure to be a good painting. But, I liked the pose to discard it as a failed painting. I left it in the garage not knowing what to do with it. Then, last year, I looked at it and got some images from internet and started to compose a more complex picture. I worked on it, but did not like the color and some compositional element. Last week, I was working on the "snack time". I thought these two are similar in genre. So, I took it out and continue working on it. Well here are the results of "best effort".

Old family album

Found these pictures in my file. Aside from the last one, I took them when we got the family's first camera in 1957. Most of them are very small 1.5inch. Printing was very expensive then. The price grew exponentially with size.
I was cool, trying to make "art pictures". You can see the staging of a pretentious angle of myself reading. I like the pictures of my mother. They show her making soy sauce in our yard, and arranging flowers. I like very much the school master's awkwardness in the last picture of my mother's elementary school graduation. It will be fun to make a painting out of this. I need to rearrange the pattern of the shirts girls were wearing to make a good composition. I may change the body language of some school girls to expand the feeling of awkwardness. Hmm... Will be a challenging task. My mother is at the left corner of the last row.