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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COMING SOON: Pin-ups continued

The reason I've been procrastinating about blogging lately is because of major procrastinatitis about finishing a project I began a while back. All my projects seem to have begun 'a while back' - some time in the Neanderthal period.

Anyway this particular one is to make a video thingy to further explore those faces, my pin-ups, first posted on 23 March . I'm in the middle of working (euphemism for playing around) on it and it should be up soon.

It's a fascinating subject. What subject? Hard to describe exactly. Something to do with a specific arrangement of facial features (male, in this case) which certain individuals have in common, along with astonishingly similar psychological characteristics. It's as if they are from the same tribe, even though in reality they are not related. The other puzzle is what makes this type - or, as I prefer to think of it: this particular assemblage of features - so damned attractive?

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THE GHOST IN THE UNDERWEAR

I was in the shower today when my eyes caught a glimpse of something that I couldn't believe. A face, a marble face was hanging on the bathroom door. My imagination is playing tricks, I thought, there is no face. But the smoothly sculpted female ghost with heavy eyelids didn't go away. It took a few more second for my brain to grasp that my underwear hanging from the door handle was accidentally draped in such a way as to suggest this apparition.
I fetched the camera and took this photo and I swear I haven't altered or enhanced the picture or the objects in any way: this is exactly what I saw. Once you've noticed the face, you almost obliterate the fact of what it actually is. But if you focus on the facts, then you might not see the face at all.
I often see faces within random objects but this was one of the most striking examples I've ever encountered. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about seeing images in clouds, on walls etc. Face-recognition patterns are built in to our brains right from the start but these unexpected and fleeting ghosts are interesting in their own right. Are there some around you right now that you could photograph?


UPDATE: For the benefit of those who couldn't see the face in the first photo, I've added a smoothed-by-Photoshop version.  Now do you see it?
 
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SPEEDED-UP DRAWING EXPERIMENT

See it on Blip TV and on Blaugustine