Rhonda, with headress and flames: I made this piece a while ago, over the course of…a year, I think? I had taken a figure drawing workshop in which I completed the original sketch of the model pictured. She had the most interesting expressions when posing, but I wasn’t very good at faces.
Since I have been a lifetime student of classical music (piano), which involves an understanding of music composition, it occurred to me that musical compositions are built upon patterns of theme and variation. Since that epiphany, I have structured several works on classical music forms.
I had some left-over sketches of female forms from workshops past, and again decided to use this one to represent a real person. As the body is only a physical house in which we live, I found that painting a person, for me, comes down to the colors and shapes that resonate with them. So while the body is just a random one, these colors represent a childhood friend of mine whom I love with all my heart!
Sandra from Mars is just a painting of a badass alien woman who talks as much and as loudly as she wants to, laughs as brashly unapologetically and obnoxiously as ever, and is the type of being I personally aspire to be.
These two women possess two types of color palettes in people that bring me peace. Also really wanted to capture the beautiful and interesting patterns and shapes of cellulite and rolls and curves and all that greatness!
I’ve been deliberately cultivating his long attention span. Whatever he’s interested in, that’s the most important thing, so I encourage him to keep doing that as long as possible. I never say, “Come on! Let’s go. We’ll go to the beach or forest, and make things with sticks for five hours before he’s ready to switch. Other families come to the playground for 20 or 30 minutes, but we’d just stay there for hours, immersed in some newly invented game. Nobody else can hang with us like this. Everyone else gets so bored. Of course my adult mind wanders to all the other things we could be doing. But I let it go, and return to that present focus.
