This week I tutored a sweet Japanese Physics student through stages of a philosophy paper, it was hard work for both of us -me eliciting coherent ideas and grammar, he pushing himself to produce, and then felt bad because I spent the money on paints and cheap brushes (when I have tubes of paint and sable brushes in storage). But a friend at another site loves #7 and has asked about it, so I should feel better...

Also I found a card table with a wobbly leg that I fixed in about 2 seconds and it's now a 'painting table' - so I don't have to put the dishes on the floor while I use the tiny bathroom counter - although it takes up nearly all the room in my tiny space. It's so damp down here too, that I wonder how these paintings will dry. Oh, fret, fret.

Ok, a garden goddess, based on a photo my daughter took (my choice of location & pose, I couldn't resist those roses), and I look way younger, but whadya wanna make of it? ::grins:: Paint & brush seem to be doing their own thing. Perhaps I'm celebrating a younger self, who knows. I guess I'll have to get a really fine brush to darken the face more & put a teeny tiny dot of colour in the eyes...

It strikes me that the 'open heart' of Self Portrait #7 has here turned into a canopy of open, blossoming magenta roses...

Oil on canvas, 9.25" x 7.75".

Update: Here's a merge of some photos over the last three years... no, one can't be blonde forever:) Click for larger size.



For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

What engulfs emits light.
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I had put this commentary in a comment below, something I might try from time to time when I don't want to overload the image for you...

I read this article, Lighter Side of Black Holes, and later the image I've posted emerged. As I pondered my syllogism, what engulfs emits light, I wondered how it would translate across time shifts and conscious ripples. The statement spawned in my consciousness from reading about a 'scientific discovery,' that is presumably based in the empirical world, in the 'real' world of verifiable happenings, could be applied to other areas of human experience.

Emotionally what does it mean: what engulfs emits light.

And in terms of a kind of dominant gene, combative, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, Tennyson Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, all the devouring that goes on, is there always a record of the engulfment? That light is emitted?

The conclusions my night-time/morning mind came to, what engulfs emits light, have pulled me into strange and wondrous musings on the philosophical ramifications...

"Scientists have cracked a huge cosmic paradox — how black holes can be the darkest objects known but also responsible for a quarter of all light and other radiation produced in the universe since the Big Bang."

Like, wow.

(I am attempting morning pages, even if it's only a few lines.)

On A Summer's Morning

Something a little more pure. Where the gift is.

The hot humid air bathes me.

I use espresso coffee in my coffee maker; flavourful, earthy.

Free the moment of its burdens.

Find home.
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After which I meditated for many hours on what home is, and this continued day after day. It's become a mantra whose sound I follow. Even today watching the leaves catch the morning's rain, remembering filling the hugest flower pot I could find with as many red geraniums as it could fit for the doorstep of my old house and wondering where again I shall be watering such richly red blossoms. I think of Jean, Mary, Tamar, who are all in perhaps similar though different processes on the meaning of home...

And then the Linden tree down the street, filling the road with such gold. I picked up a handful of marigold-yellow seed fluff and placed it in a small pewter-glazed ceramic bowl. The beginning of an alter, it feels like.

But that's another story.

Paint's still wet (oil on canvas)...

I haven't painted in a very long time, but yesterday bought a small set of oils and one brush, and tonight cleared the foot & a half space on the bathroom counter where we have our dish rack and painted one of the self portraits. There was no black or even brown paint, hence the blue hair. Is the red paint her heart? I give the paint a fair bit of freedom to do what it wants and become witness to the results. What emerged frightened and exhilirated me. A meditation in 'emergent self'? - my dream of a few nights ago said, use brushes, not sticks, which I took to mean paints not watercolour pencils. Interesting. Not quite starlight, but tiny pin pricks of an opening of something...

Mary Ann says, "The red part in the middle looks like your heart is open for all to see."

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Update: Sparky's asked me to decide how to post this mini series. Gnash, gnash. Ok, decision. All together, but he only has to post one. There are 10 so far, and I'm planning to paint at least one of them too.

They're all clickable for readability.
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Da Original



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Da drawing:



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De first batch of Self Portrait of Woman Gone Walkin':







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Da Second Batch:










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Yat is enough. She gonna stay home now! (Or leave town!) NO MORE WALKIN', Self Portrait!

(Sometimes ya git caught in a swirling eddy [of walkin' S-Ps] [oh, 'n there's no overlayin'; they's all real shots in real places, even if enhanced later] & ya can't hardly git out!)

(the first two, the twigs, & vertical lines, from dreams the night before)

Don't use twigs, use brushes.

The downward vertical line & the upward vertical line don't meet, and she saw this years ago and went away distraught.

It's SunFire Day. Solstice.

The typoGenerator* threw up some of my images. A photograph of a red tulip; a line drawing of a pensive woman.

In the field of green, some random red.

My dog lies sleeping beside me; she always has to be near.

The wall clock ticks. The world holds still. O

Meditate.

(I did for an hour.)

Then move, fast.

(I didn't. But ran into an old friend in her blue Rav4 later, the same car she drove me out to a farm in the country 5 years ago to meet and fall in love with a certain puppy, an occurrence which seemed stretched like a line inevitably from this point.)

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*thanks to Dave for the link

Surely post & then take this down... the photo underlaying the drawing (which will surely do more walking), unadorned, plain, as is, the background fuzzed, oh yeah, well...

I apologize for updating posts; it drives me crazy too. Yesterday was a case in point (surely dozens of times, those with aggregators must have... oh, sorry!). But the post kept growing! I eventually took the drawing and photographed it in different places - no overlays, the real drawing in real places: leaves, a gutter, a posting pole. Now I'm thinkin' where else I could take her. Any suggestions?

Self Portrait of Woman Wandering the City.

No comments allowed on this post; you'll have to go back to the other one...

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

The Non-Suffering Method of Drawing a Self-Portrait: take a photo, some good contrasts work best; lighten it & print (no need to use copious amounts of toner); paper clip it to the sheet you want to draw on; hold up on a window with bright sunlight behind and trace...


This is a traced drawing of the new profile pic. Looks way too young, but that's beside the point. Why? It's hard to draw ourselves - afterall, we haven't spent a lifetime looking at our faces. I have no real idea of my eye or nose or mouth shape, nor the way the curls fall. So I'm learning... for all you folks who don't draw, this is a viable way to learn! Even if it doesn't exactly turn out to 'look' like us.





A hand drawn image of a photograph photographed. O, this is fun! Lady of the Vines, or the Forest, or Fence Sitter.






In the gutter!

WORK AT HOME on this woman!

YES, she's been sighted all over the city!

Self Portrait goes walking!

Intrepid artist wearing a sun visor and sunglasses and a skimpy red dress seen taping suspicious SELF PORTRAIT to public poles and drains!