Monday, September 20, 2010

FATHER AND CHILD PICTURE

My youngest niece and her husband (I posted pictures of their wedding some time ago) had their second baby on September 14th. I haven't seen the infant boy in the flesh yet but of the photos they sent, one in particular just cried out to be painted. So here's my version, digitally drawn on graphic tablet, from the photo below. 

By the way, in case you're wondering, I don't use photos as digital layers to trace and paint over or to make more 'painterly' by using filters. In this and other digital portraits I start with a blank page and look at the original photo as if it were a live model, drawing and painting directly from it onto my graphic tablet, using Photoshop brushes. I consider it cheating to manipulate a photo itself with digital processes in order to produce something that may look like a painting but is actually an altered photograph. 


Mother-and-child paintings are legion but, at least to my knowledge, there aren't that many of father and child. This one has got to be a contender, don't you think?

September almost gone already! Sorry for the long gaps between posts - have been busy offline. I will (really really) be posting more Vie en Rosé soon.




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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

NOT THE BLAIR INTERVIEW SHOWN ON THE BBC ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

but my altered version, inserting a different view from those spectacular windows and a more appropriate soundtrack. Unfortunatley the sound doesn't come up on my video below but it's working fine on the main Blaugustine and also at blip.tv

If you didn't see that BBC interview it's available at this link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard Cohen's The Future.

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Thursday, September 02, 2010

RECENT PORTRAITS

Just to show I'm not sitting around brooding guiltily all the time, heh heh, here are some recent portraits done for the ongoing Julia Kay's Portrait Party. If you go to my Flickr page there you can see bigger versions by clicking on each picture. And I'm nearly nearly done with the big Prism painting. 






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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

GUILT PURSUED

The thoughtful comments to the last post here and at my main blog are forcing me to look further into this murky topic. Having established that what my own particular guilt-harpy keeps harping about is that I'm guilty of Squandering My Gifts and Not Living Up to My Potential the logical next question is: what exactly are these gifts or potential which I'm supposedly not living up to? Do they exist at all or are they yet another mirage? Another false concept plugged into my brain by the competitive, egocentric, celebrity-obsessed culture we live in? 

Well, you know, maybe. But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise, is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts and the real reason why the exasperating little guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker here, a flicker there. 

You may say ah, but that's what we are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.

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