See the note below for some thoughts about this painting.
I've been wanting to do less realistic forms but still "representational". That is: not getting into any sort of abstraction, which has its place sometimes, just not to me (mostly). I also wanted to try and create a more painterly surface texture, less smooth and finished. A dry-brush technique seemed a good thing to try here.
I had a library book out called The World New Made by Timothy Hyman. This is subtitled "Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century" and takes its place in opposition to "Abstraction", an art style that came to dominate modern art post-war. It's a good book: not just some great artists but is also written quite well, and so mostly worth reading too. Art books are sometimes excruciatingly obscure, pompous and hard to read. Luckily, the art can speak for itself. A section "After Cubism" mentions a painter I am not familiar with, Carlo Carrà, an Italian Futurist. I've taken the head mostly from his painting House of Love, done in 1922 :
In addition to Carrà, Picasso did some paintings of monumental (a.k.a "chunky") women in the early 1920's, such as Three Women at the Spring (1921). These paintings were also some inspiration to me for the Brown Hair girl. Picasso's painting is very large and is in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) :
My painting is only 30x30cm, so not nearly so monumental. No one is going to have to move into a bigger house to hang it up and admire it. You can learn a lot by copying. Picasso knew all about that.