As is normal in a life-drawing session, there are many 'warm up' poses of 1, 3, 5 min, which isn't long enough for me to do much more than scribble.

I need at least an hour on one pose to do a drawing that I feel is getting there.___

There are over 60+ artists and some VERY wildly erotic art that makes my work look tame. Painting Neon Nights was quite the journey. The reference photo came from a book on Tantric Sex but I wanted them red and glowing - an animality, that we are animals and angels, hungering, lustful and sublime, corporeal and incorporeal. But always a loving act, nothing else would do for me.

The first version was painted in fluorescent colours, but, as I discovered to my dismay, day-glo acrylics do not blend. So I gessoed out the canvas and began again. 

This time I painted the figures using regular acrylic paints. It was still a challenge to paint their skin tones as orange-reds with yellow highlights with the right shade of deep-blue-indigo in the shadows. 

But, after the show at Foy House last summer with my Near Death Experience painting and its use of some fluorescent paint and how visionary it became under some of their black lights, I wanted to further explore how one could deliberately create a transforming painting.

After finishing the base layer in regular Golden and Liquitex acrylics, I began glazes of the fluorescent colours. There is a very limited palette of these night glowing paints. They don't work smoothly and you need larger soft brushes if you hope to avoid streaks. I had to make the patchy quality of applying thin layers of these glow-in-the-dark shades work. There are no dark colours for shadows in the day-glo range so that was the biggest challenge, really. Getting those shadows in and getting them to glow in a shadow way under a black light was hard.

I purchased a black light flashlight from Amazon to use as I painted and to keep checking that the 'normal' version wasn't getting wrecked and that the 'black light' version was shining. That is what I used to show the day-glo colours for the short video clip above.

Am I please with the result? H*ll yeah. 

Also, since the sexual is the spiritual, has been for me all my life, I needed a sense of intimacy, of enjoyment, of something of the loss of the ego self in the act of making love.

A friend on Facebook, Bogos (he changed his name on Facebook and I can't remember his real surname), a terrific artist, really amazing, where these paintings were posted for a very short time, wrote, and I appreciate him for this support:

into death.

 

 

Clearly, I need to work on that hand!

Below it is better drawn. Also, since the paper is a bit larger than the scanner, I photomerged two images (still issue in one corner), colour-corrected the paper and dimmed the blacks since it's a very light 6H pencil.

The most difficult part of life drawing for me is getting the figure in proportion. If there's, say, an hour, I'll spend half of it drawing  and rubbing out and rubbing out as I try to map the figure correctly. 

___

From yesterday's shoot. The lighting was all wrong, but, with time and patience and a willingness to use different photo programs, I was able to get the darkness I wanted.

Basically, I am trying to get some images of this assemblage so I can see what I've composed and write of the 'being' who's emerging, if that's possible. Also, it is helping to see how to tweak things - like, I'll wear black boots, the sneakers didn't work with my body type. I have to get floral tape to do the flowers that I stick into the (cheap Amazon) corset (only solution I could think of to hold the flowers) and figure out how to attach the trailing leaves on my arm, perhaps hot-glued to elastic (if I have any wide black elastic), who knows. It should be an assemblage that doesn't slide off over an evening's movements. Also, I'll likely be moving in a videopoem, and then certainly could have leaves falling, trailing, whenever I get around to that.