Portrait of A. After a Bad Haircut, Mugshot 105 (12 inches square)

This one was touch and go. A.had just got a bad haircut and was very upset, crying, and her nose and eyes were red and swollen. I was immediately in a hurry to get it down ( and yet not seem heartless)  but keep her in her engorged state as long as possible.

Mugshot 104: Portrait of the Immigration Lawyer (12 x16 inches oil on panel)

This is the nicest guy ever, the guy you would want to be your lawyer if you HAD to have one. He attends  the same drop in life drawing session I go to, and agreed to let me shoot him under the model's light -- which as you can see is extreme from the top down, a very friendly situation for painting. There was a painting on the wall  behind him which I took out and then put back because  -- well, this guy can really draw and yet is a lawyer, and I think all lawyers should have to take some life drawing classes along the way and learn to see human beings with some tenderness, and when I am dictator.....
But really, this painting is all about the plaid shirt.

Mugshot 103: Protrait of G. (As Frida) 8x10 " oil on panel

This is a second painting of an earlier photograph from 2 summers back, may not be the same pose, but same sitting. 4 Italian women took me to see the Kahlo show in Rome and I asked them to dress up as Frida (afterwards) and I shot them to paint. This was based on Ellen Heck's Forty Fridas show - heartbreaking beautiful.  I found painting the women much more difficult than I thought -- I didn't quite have the skills to get what I wanted, and what I wanted was a good Ellen Heck. I am laughing to realize that now. However I have continued to paint them and slowly they are coming into my own version of them. This is G., a proud beauty. There was so much definite pink and green in her skin because of the lighting -- we were in front of a balcony of course, with the sunshine streaming  into the darkened room -- and then I had to figure out how to lay the pinks over the greens and vice versa and preserve each color but match tone.  Really interesting technically to do, and fun to try to get it.

Still Life With Plates, 36 inches square, oil on canvas

This started out in realism and finished itself in abstraction, my old home.

I  have a thing about plates, dishes --- I love them. Also fun to work biggish  again, to really swing the arm and use fat brushes and palette knives and work in a frenzy, collapse into a chair and evaluate for a couple of hours. Realism is  a different way of working (for me so far), a lot of technical stuff (and some of it crap I think, but which?)  needs to be established and then I think, transcended. Oy, I don't know the answers.

Mugshot 102: The Italian (12 x 12 " oil on panel)

Well, I have been doing a lot of painting but no posting because I have been taking a class with Joseph Todorovitch and learning new stuff, therefore I've been in that in-between place where nothing is any good, nothing really resolved because, well, the whole experience rocked my world.
I recently decided I would finish everything up, starting from the left off place of not knowing what to do, and just taking the whole thing gently but firmly to its logical end. New stuff seeps in somehow,  but it's the old bicycle thing, all the parts working smoothly without wrenching effort, and then you're simply riding, fantastic
Do more painting is the thing to do, and make more of an effort to paint for pleasure. So in these paintings next up,  it's what I did for fun.