kometes

Ink and watercolor on foam board/c. 9.5" x 8.75"

Webster's says that the Greek word for comet is kometes, comets of course those sparkling sky travelers with a tail that precedes them or so I've come to understand.  Hard to imagine the object essentially moving into or toward what appears to the eye as "exhaust", if you will.  Certainly it is the flare/flair of light that attracts the attention and the cone shaped light like the product of combustion for those with feet on the ground.
So my lines curve and shoot about from my hand; my hand directs the brush as if the movement were the "product" of my mind.  In fact, sometimes it feels like I, me, my mind, is simply the observer and I am chasing the process and seeing the result while it forms as I rush into it. 
The lines or rays flowing from her eye, like the brilliant waves of light from a comet, herald her arrival.

Report: Page Seven (Is this all you've done all summer?!)

Untitled
Watercolor/charcoal/gouache on paper
18" x 24"

Haven't been here for a few days.  Away at the beach gathering shell subjects and swimming, reading and doing some occasional sketchbook drawings.  The picture above was done maybe in June I think.  On a side note I've become (this will be of no interest to anyone I imagine-so the self assessment which follows must be proof positive of its accuracy) a Morrissey fan to the exclusion of just about all other music I listen to while working.  Who does that other than an obsessive, groupie sort of personality which I fear, at my "advanced age", I have become!!  Wish I had discovered him and The Smith's twenty-plus years ago!
On the subject of painting, particularly the piece above, I'm reminded to suggest to myself again and again:  "thing slowly, paint fast".

Charcoal Drawing

My favorite from the last Artspace life drawing session I attended earlier this month.  Charcoal on mat board, c. 10 x 12.

Faces

Oil on canvas

Watercolor, gouache, charcoal on paper

Watercolor and charcoal on paper

I cropped these from some larger pieces.  Just wanted to study the faces without the distraction of whatever surrounds them.  To suggest that the face is most suggestive of mood (subject's and/or picture-maker's) is, well, almost silly, huh?  Body language is suggestive but the face...well.

She reminds me of Wyeth's Helga

Wyeth, in something that I recall reading, referred to himself as making abstract work. That may or may not be a difficult self-observation for some to swallow. I can see it, I think; his work was so amplified, super-real at times, that it seems he went beyond duplicating what was before him. The lines (which of course don't exist in the observable world) that he was required to make to construct the image expressed a quality in the subject separate from the subject itself. I think that is abstraction. When I made this I was attuned to what I felt; an energy, attitude or emotion, an ethereal expression.