Rev. Irving Channon, SU Divinity School dean from 1921-1931

Irving Monroe Channon was born in 1862 in Durant, Iowa. He received his education at Griswold College (B.A., 1887) and at Oberlin College (M.A.). He was conferred a B.D. degree by Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1890. He was ordained as a minister of the Congregational Church in 1888. Channon and his wife Mary started their work under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1893 and served as missionaries of the Congregational Christian Churches for 40 years. This article by Ligaya Magbanua Simpkins outlines how the Channons laid the groundwork for what is now the Silliman University Divinity School. 

I used the tiny photo in the Magbanua-Simpkins article as reference. The Divinity School had sent me a larger version of the same photo, but it had been distorted by the angle of the camera. I relied on a soft pastel pencil (Caran d'Ache) in sanguine for the most part, then added shadows with Cretacolor dark sepia and light sepia pencils, and highlights with a pale gray Carbothello pastel pencil. I only used white chalk (Cretacolor) for the eyeglass reflections, as too much can make a pastel portrait look ghostly from certain angles and, well, chalky. There are traces of blue in the jacket and some of the darker areas of the face, and just the tiniest smudge of cool red in some areas. 

I'm happy, to some degree, with the sketch, but at the same time I feel it makes Rev. Channon look, well, ordinary. Contemporary. Pedestrian. Like an elderly man interviewed on the BBC about the Covid-19 lockdown. It had been my ambition from the onset to make these near-mythical (but also largely forgotten) figures from Silliman University's past come to life, but now, with the first of these realized goals staring me in the face, what I feel is a measure of dismay. I need to add some deeper, mysterious shadows and shine a cooler, sharper light -- the light of insight and election, perhaps -- on my subject. I think, however, that Channon will look more like Channon once I paint him in oils. 

The advantage of making these sketches before I begin the actual paintings is that I understand and analyze the structures of the subjects' faces as revealed by the play of light and shadow. This reduces the need to make corrections while painting -- and the corresponding frustration, and the desire to take a brush loaded with black paint to one's work. (This won't be that kind of portrait.)