Kim, Sorry to have missed the extensive comments in the Resource Photo area. (I'm having trouble keeping up with the dailies, much less the archives.) Anyway, it does seem as though the issues I raised have already been pretty much hashed out.
I'm very happy to see folks paint what they want to, by the way -- I have lots of studio figure work that I couldn't post here, and I paint lots of things besides portraits -- and I trust that you understand I wasn't saying you couldn't do this picture this way if you wanted to.
Just to clarify, it isn't the "pregnant woman" aspect that I meant to speak to, but the compositional pull of a large, high-contrast area down in the corner of the painting, drawing attention away from some otherwise very interesting and well-rendered parts of the picture, most notably her facial structure, nice skin tones, and hair, as well as some of the drapery dynamics in the fabric. The belly just isn't as interesting to me, and yet it's doing most of the compositional shouting (and kicking, I would imagine.)
My wife looked at this earlier today and said, "Well, that must have been the most important part for the artist." Interestingly, she was assuming that the artist must be male. The implications of that assumption probably go too far beyond this discussion, at least tonight.
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