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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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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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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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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