Thought Process, aka Procrastination

the women in this painting need faces. I've held off painting their faces because I knew they weren't going to look like the women in the photograph, but I wanted them to have some of the essence of the photo, nonetheless. It doesn't help that these are my grandmother and my great grandmother in this picture. Their own personal identities have been obscured by time and family dysfunctions. So whose face, whose essence do I paint into this picture?

The going has been slow, and I confess, I am easily distracted.

After doing a little thinking with a pencil in hand, I realize that their faces are pieces of myself.

I tried to remember how my great grandmother's eyes were large, and dark, though somehow empty when I met her. And I was little, so she was no doubt, a bit daunting. In my mind, she is alway sitting at the end of the flip-up formica table in my grandmother's kitchen. She is tiny, birdlike in her fragility, and she's hunched over, smoking perpetually. (There is something terribly wrong with the nose on this woman - I'm going to erase all my pencil marks and start over.) My grandmother, on the other hand, is obviously the protagonist in this picture. While sketching on her I realized that this affinity, or sympathy for who I thought she might have been like in her early married life, is the real subject of this painting. And while there may be aspects of myself in each of these figures, my identification with both of them becomes the hidden portrait in this painting. Hmm, food for thought. So there you have it - a glimpse into my painting block, and the annoyingly self-absorbed psuedo-self-analysis that goes along with figuring out where to go.

And it's only Monday!

Woof - who's up for a lunch break at Tacos Mexico? (this is the procrastination part, like you couldn't tell!)