1:01 PM: i'm close to completing my commission: to make 18 colored pencil portraits of the speakers at TEDX VAIL, which will take place on january 6th. it has been a very rewarding experience; nothing like i've ever done before, although i've made many portraits during my life as an artist. here are the two i completed today: mark gerzon and sheryl winarick.
BELOW: the 13 completed portraits, with 3 more to complete:
4:43 PM: so this is how far i got with portrait #12 of 18 before leaving my studio at 3 to take a walk with mikela. think again! too cold to walk today. sure we could do it, but walking for an hour in 17 F temperatures is a struggle.
this is mark gerzon, author, leadership expert, and veteran convener of cross-party conversations. i wasn't satisfied with the online still shots i found of him, so i used an image form a video of one of his talks. i'll complete it tomorrow morning & move on to portrait #13.
1:58 PM: the completed drawing of betsy ray:
12:27 PM: just started portrait # 11 of 16 TEDX speakers at the january 6 TEDX VAIL. it is of betsy ray, an activist who wants to change the world's perceptions about diabetes. Here's the initial sketch; i'm about to add color.
LOOKING BACK:
in 2010, having visited my son & grandkids on andros, in greece, upon our return i made a series of paintings. this one was drawn from photographs i had taken that summer on andros, at a beach called piso yialia. "piso" means back or behind; yialia is a beach just off the road running along the bay beneath the capitol of chora. piso yialia is not on a road, so you hike over a little hill to get there. like most great beaches, it used to be almost completely deserted, with goats grazing on the steep hillside. now you can't go to yialia without being acoustically attacked by loud music blaring over loudspeakers and being met with a row of beach umbrellas neatly lined up. in other words, they fucked it up.
i made many paintings of piso yialia, and recently discovered a photo of an extended family from the village of stenies, just behind piso yialia. they had come down together for a day at the beach. they lay sprawled beneath a makeshift striped canvas shelter supported by 4 oars. food and drink was plentiful. some were dressed, other wore their bathing suits. they were the only ones on the beautiful beach, and behind them one could see the characteristic yialia rocks, forming a protective natural barrier. piso yialia was, at that time, during the '70's, so close to the bustle of civilization, and yet one felt transported to a place beyond time and space; dreamtime.
6:24 PM: today i made a portrait of environmental artist doron gazit, who will be speaking next month at TEDX VAIL. this is #10 of 16. i may do 2 more tomorrow, since i need to complete them before new years, so that kat can make them into posters for the event. doron is looking up because the photo i worked from is one of him installing an installation piece.
11:45 AM: yesterday, christmas day & the first day of chanukah, i set out to make a present i intend to send to a good friend in D.C. although it's a small collage: 11x8", it took all day. when i showed it to mikela, she fell in love with it & asked if she could keep it. of course i said yes, so today, after doing 1 or 2 more TEDX speaker portraits, i may try doing another small collage on paper for our friend in D.C.
by the way, during the collaging process, i used one of my friend dan's vintage maps of maine, a map of baltimore, a few bits of a lucien freud painting & a few other odds & ends. thanks lucien.
2:23 PM: i've began reinventing gaze 35. in a slapdash (not messy) mood, i attacked the canvas with a passion, first collaging paper cut into biomorphic shapes, then riffing on a detail of titian's venus with a mirror. BELOW left to right: gaze 35 before the intervention, in the 1st phase and how it looked a few minutes ago.
on the RIGHT: titian's venus with a mirror
12:34 PM: started the day with my 9th, out of 13, colored pencil portrait of one of the speakers at next month's TEDX event in vail. he is john kedrowski, PHD.
and now i'm about to make changes, possibly major changes, to gaze 35. after a month hanging in the house, we both agree it needs revision.
2:20 PM: here is the tweaked gaze 14. the only change i made was to the upper left quadrant, which you see in the detail below, and on the second row, you see the painting before and after my intervention. notice how your eye gets a little stuck on that straight line of the map border on the upper left.:
12:03 PM: arrived a tad late at the studio. jumped right in to completing another TEDX speaker portrait, this one of charles orgbon III. here's the initial sketch & the completed portrait.
now i'm going to make a minor adjustment to gaze 14. after seeing it hanging in the house, something minor but annoying showed up. i'll post the before & after once it's complete.
1:24 PM: just started another one, this time of speaker amory lovins. here are stages 1 & 2:
12:23 PM: stage 3 of my drawing of alex woodard; this may be the final, completed stage.
11:57 AM: stage 2 of my drawing of TEDX speaker alex woodard.
i think there's a bit more i'd like to do on this drawing; i'll post changes as they occur.
11:22 am: it's snowing & the light is not great for painting. a perfect day for making a few more TEDX speaker drawings. i decided to post stages of the drawing i'm currently working on, so that you can follow my process, as i have been doing with the gaze series. so here's stage 1 of my drawing of alex woodard
2:49 PM: extensive changes were made to everything but the face. that's a challenging thing to do, since you're treating the picture plane as if one area were more important than the other. but i didn't want to sacrifice the delicate beauty of the face, and i think what i did worked. there may be more needed, and as always i'll know once i hang it in the house later this afternoon. BELOW: the before (left) and after.
right now i'm going to clean up and get ready for our afternoon stupa walk. right now the temperature is hovering around freezing; a lot warmer than it's been over the past 3-4 days. we'll put on our cleats, which keep us form slipping on the ice, and make our way up to the stupa: about a mile uphill.
11:13 AM: gaze 14 was brought back to the house & hung on the prime east wall, where you can see it from 0 to 60 feet. it didn't pass the overnight test, so this morning it was brought back to the studio for additional work. part of the problem, which has been ongoing, is that i attempted, unconsciously, to repeat the successes of the previous painting, gaze 36, which was inspired in part by a burst of energy created by the prospect of collaborating with a local artist. i had been inspired by the collaboration i discovered between rubens and bruegel, which lasted many years.
but, whatever the inspiration, repeating a solution discovered in one painting never translates to another. it simply doesn't work hat way! artists do it all the time, but it's obvious to the discerning viewer. ABOVE: on the left, the successful gaze 36, on on the right my doomed attempt at re-creating those solutions in gaze 14. will anyone ever notice or appreciate all this? irrelevant! you do your best. period.
1:31 PM: mikela stopped by this morning & pointed out an area she felt needed work. she dislikes streight lines in these paintings, and one that was especially drawing her attention away from the rest of the painting was the edges of the blue map to the right of her face.
i worked on it, collaging a piece of another map, which i had cut into a biomorphic shape. it worked, and now, if you compare the images above, (today's version is on the right) you'll see what a big difference that little intervention has made. that blue right angle of the map is gone & your eye is now free to roam the surface unimpeded, and the mysterious energy of gaze 14 has been restored. i also did some subtle work on the face itself; mostly to the eyes, lips, neck and the shape of her cheek. her left eye, in particular was tweaked, so that there are shadows above & beneath, pushing the eye back so that it no longer pops out.
a dream i had this morning is playing some role in my work today, but i can't put my finger on exactly what that is. i was on a flight form NYC to L.A. a woman was walking down the aisle with a pillow, making lots of noise & annoying me. i followed her back to her row, and she sat down on a man's lap in the center seat. as i drew closer and prepared to talk to her, i realized it was my mother! what, i asked out loud, are the odds? i haven't been on a transcontinental flight in over a decade. and to meet my mother on this flight? one in ten million! i looked behind her head to see who the man was, and it was my father! at the point i totally lost it. the feelings it engendered in me were warm and loving ones. i was thrilled and honored to have reconnected with my parents, both of whom have died, and who divorced while i was a student in college.
gaze 14, 32x32", at 2 pm today
2:34 PM: this afternoon i finally got back to my easel. i did more work on gaze 14, and i think it's definitely an improvement. my inspiration for her now teeters somewhere between rubens and fayum. her gaze however is indisputably coming from my years of viewing fayum portraits, going back to the late '60's and early '70's, when i made studies of fayum portraits on site, in the louvre and the british museum. while the rubens portrait i drew from reflects his sexual attraction to his new 16 year old bride, gaze 14 brings to mind the poignant, timeless gaze of many of the 1st c. fayum portraits. in terms of pure painterly qualities, i feel the paintings in this series are ever more accomplished in that realm, always pushing the boundaries of what is technically possible with the unforgiving acrylic medium.
