My wonderful painting instructor and friend, Kimberly Trowbridge, opened her back yard to a small group of us on Friday for a plein-air painting session. We spent three hours painting her wonderful friend and model, Jessie. Here's my painting from that session.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered today. I am without words. He was my hero for twenty years. He was a great man.

I'm going to post some pictures I took of the process of painting Zoey's portrait. It's useful to review the process, both the successful and unsuccessful parts (I've included one of those deliberately). This was a 10-day workshop and I tried to take photos at least once daily during that time.


Day 1 -- In drawing, the block in is where you establish the basic dimensions of the picture, like how high versus wide is the head, and where is the line of the shoulders, and how much of the body is included in the picture, and what is the angle of the head. In painting you do the same thing only you include the very general color shapes such as the triangle of Zoey's headscarf and the shape of her top (which changed once as you can see -- at first she had the shawl closed around her torso). The paint is thinned with mineral spirits to make it flow quickly, so the canvas is still visible beneath the paint. Nothing here is set in stone. The idea is just to get the canvas covered.


Day 2 -- It was a very cloudy day, and the light was dim from the north window all day. I wanted to mark very generally where the lights and darks were on Zoey -- the left (our right) side of her head, the shadows on her left collarbone, the shadow cast by her arm across her shawl, the darker areas of her top, the very bottom of the armrest. I wanted stronger colors overall and more accurate colors, closer to what I was actually seeing. I adjusted her hand because her thumb wasn't visible any more, opened her eyes, and painted in her earring.


Day 4 -- Zoey's eyes in the cold north light are a very light bluish gray. It was hard to get them the right color. Here they are too light. Her earring was actually lapis, a royal blue, but I tried making it a dark green at first because I was afraid the blue would be too jarring. I worked especially hard this day on the pattern of her shawl, which was a gorgeous jacquard woven in all sorts of greens, golds and chocolate browns. I also spent a lot of time on her hand, trying to make the foreshortening work and accurately paint the shading on the far side of her wristbone. I made her nose a lot redder, because the blood vessels in nose, ears and chin are very close to the skin and those parts of the face are the rosiest. These are all places where I knew I was going to have to do more work -- I'm still trying to work from the general to the specific. I'm also trying to think about temperature, and looking at the cool green reflection from her top bouncing onto the underside of her jawline and the left shoulder and neck. The blackboard behind her was a really difficult thing to paint ... was it gray? Blue? I couldn't figure it out.

Day 5 -- Frustrated at the end of the week, I took a day off and painted a one-day study as a break.


Day 6 -- Beginning of the second week. Now her earring is blue and I don't like it but I'm not thinking about it right now. Her scarf is less orange than it was, and I tried to show how it's thinner in back and has more folds in front. I also realized that it was not as far forward on her forehead as I'd had it, so I pushed it back on her head to show more of her high forehead. I lightened her eyebrows because they were too dark (you can still see one darker eyebrow) and darkened her eye color to try to get it more accurate. The strong green under her jawline changed to a lighter, less specific color. Her nose bothered me; it was too big for her face, and her mouth was too small; seen full on, Zoey has a wide mouth that contrasts with her long oval face, and I couldn't get it right. There's a very awkward dark brown shadow on the inside of her left arm, next to her top.


Day 8 -- Oh, BOY did I mess this up. I could tell that Zoey's face was too dark, and I tried to lighten it all day long on Day 7, but it was still dark on the morning of Day 8, and I said "what the hell" and threw myself into it. At midmorning I could see that she had suddenly turned into a terrifying clown with pancake white makeup on. Aaaaaaugh! Well, fortunately, you can always repaint an oil. I took a photo of it to remind myself how NOT to do things.


Day 9 -- Still too pale, but not so horribly so. I'm still struggling with the nose and mouth. The hand got a little better, and I took some minty green paint and just carelessly jabbed in the highlights on her top, which was one of those stretch velvet things that have lots of luster. I'm trying to figure out how to make the background look -- dark towards her shawled shoulder and lighter on top? and also trying to make sure that the edge of her hair against the blackboard is not a sharp line. When lines are very sharp, the shape they outline appears flat to the viewer; when the lines are less sharp, the object can be made to appear to move back in space more. I didn't want her head to look like a cut out, so I wanted the edge to be blurry. Also take a look at her near shoulder -- in the previous picture it makes almost a right angle at her neck, and I realized that I had painted her without a trapezius muscle on that side (thank you, Matt Buckner, teacher of Artistic Anatomy!). Fixed it.


Day 10 -- Here is the final version. I blurred out the line between the blackboard and the wall to the right. Changed her earring to a light green, because it was too attention-getting in its true lapis color. I realized this morning that her earring had been unintentionally placed smack in the middle of the canvas, and it was going to be impossible to look anywhere else if the color wasn't pushed back some. Tried to make her far cheekbone, and the whole shaded side of her face, appear less flat and more like it was turning away from us. This is called "turning the form" and is a huge challenge. The skill to make things appear round on a flat surface is something I am still learning. I blended the colors between her face and neck so that she doesn't appear pancaked any more, and made her nose narrower (finally!).

I'm very happy with it. It's not perfect, it's not even great, but I do feel that I learned and accomplished a lot. Thank you, Yuqi and Zoey.

Here is "Zoey," oil painting completed during "Expressive Portrait Painting," a two week workshop taught by Yuqi Wang (http://www.yuqiwangart.us/) at Gage during April 2009.

Pigeon, March 2009 red conte crayon on rives bfk paper, 19" x 30"

The above drawing took me 24 hours (eight three hour sessions) in the Advanced Figure Drawing class at Gage. Geoff Flack was the instructor.

Here's my most recent still life, "Sushi." This was done in John Rizzotto's Still LIfe Painting class at Gage, and I'm very happy with it. It's "Wandering Poet" sake and some plastic sushi that I found on the internet -- it's amazing what you can find on the internet these days!



I forgot to post another picture from last year's pastel class. This is Pigeon, an immensely gorgeous biracial woman who models professionally for Gage quite often. She is my favorite model, hands down -- easygoing and fun as well as a knockout. It was a delight to draw her.

I had a dream this morning (from which Alex woke me up). Mom and I were flying in a tiny, tiny plane the size of a kayak. The cockpit was open to the air, and I was the pilot, but we took turns sitting in front, almost in each other's laps. I wasn't very good at piloting, and I flapped my arms to help the plane gain altitude, and circled and circled. Mom kept getting distracted and stopping places to talk to people. At one place we were crossing a river and I thought it was the Mississippi, but she asked and it was something else, and it turned into a water park. In the forest on the riverside, there were hot springs, and people and dogs sitting in the steaming water. She had to take a picture of one guy and his dog, even though she told him I thought he was a homosexual (it hadn't occurred to me to wonder). We took off again, and circled upward. It seemed that we kept having to go higher to get over higher and higher hills. There was a girl riding her bicycle through slushy snow and talking to her friend about how she really, really wanted to get a trampoline soon. I thought to myself that she should get it now, before she gets old and loses the energy for it. We kept having to take off from inside people's houses, overlooking vistas of valleys. Most of the people had a large window or a sliding glass door that opened onto a balcony which was big enough for the plane to take off from, but every once in a while we had to back out of a house and find another. There was a large gun, like a machine gun, above the plane's nose, and at one point I was holding it and circling with my free arm and the plane began to over-tilt. I started to fall out of the plane. I dropped the gun over the side and hung on, and Mom helped me back inside the little cockpit. Then we stopped again, and I took the seat out of the plane and found the seatbelt, and replaced it. This time, I was securely seated. Again, we flapped, circled, and rose into the air. We had a long trip ahead of us to get home, but we would get there.

I haven't been uploading my paintings as I should, so I'm catching up. Here is one painting from last spring, "Quinn."


The next painting is a monochrome still life. I've just started the still life painting class. We begin with just black and white, and gradually add color to the palette. The idea is to look at your subject as a set of lights and darks, rather than colors, because value is more important when dealing with the composition of the painting. There is a saying, "Value does the work, color gets the credit." This is a candlestick my father made in shop class, and his pocket watch, and a book I threw in just because.

Here's the link:

http://www.foolscapcon.org/

GOHs are  Esther Friesner and Michael Kaluta. Foolscap is a literary relaxicon focused on "flat things", e.g. books and paper art. I'll be helping gofer it. It should be tons of fun. September 26 weekend, Bellevue, Washington.

My mom's staying at my house over the weekend. She just moved here from California. Let's gloss over all the obvious omg stuff, and cut to the chase. Scene: this morning at breakfast. I'm wearing a black T-shirt that has a Japanese character on the front.

Mom: Why are you wearing that shirt?
Me: Ummmm ... why?
Mom: I don't understand what it's saying.
Me: (shows mom that underneath the Japanese character it says "PEACE" in English).
Mom: But that doesn't say "peace," it says "flat"!
Me: OMGWTF!!!!
Mom: Ohhh, I get it. This character 干 plus this character 和 together means "peace," but if you only have the first character, all it says is "flat"!
Me: (rips off t-shirt, throws it in trash, dies of embarrassment)
Marcus: Hey! KANGA! Guess what Rabbit's shirt really says!!!!

I just got home from Wiscon 32, which is the feminist science-fiction convention in Madison, over Memorial Day weekend. I'd gotten Chris a ticket and twisted her arm until she agreed to come out from the wilds of New Jersey and meet me, and we had an awesome time. I found myself thinking of ideas that I hadn't wrestled with since college or shortly thereafter. There were discussions of racism in fantasy writing, how to create a world, a smackdown between Philip Pullman and C.S. Lewis (general conclusion: Pullman wins hands-down, but Lewis gets points for writing a series to which Pullman felt the need to respond so brilliantly). The art show was better than most, although still not devoid of badness; however I really liked Laurie Edison's images of Japanese women which included old and Korean-Japanese and Ainu and other women not often seen when you google "Japanese women". There was a fat acceptance panel, which I did not attend, but I noted that actually in comparison to Norwescon the Wiscon-goers appeared, overall, slightly more mesomorphic. There were some wonderful discussions of books for kids, books about nonwhite societies or with nonwhite protagonists, books that push sentience in different nonhuman directions. I got to hear Ted Chiang read something new, and I introduced myself to him as a friend of his wife's. Chris fiddled and I played dulcimer at least 45 minutes a day, ending with a lovely jam on a grassy lawn across the street from the Concourse hotel before my shuttle for the airport left. I found myself wishing I could be three places at once quite a lot, or at least not so much of a late-night zombie.

Back home I am struggling to put the ideas in my head into ideas on paper. The problem is that it's often easier to put ideas into words than into images for me. For example, I can think of two or three interesting ways to write about an outsider protagonist in a story right now ... but trying to figure out how to *paint* an outsider, that's harder. OTOH, the idea of painting a picture of a magical Negro is funny as hell, and very tempting.

I joined the Carl Brandon Society this morning, having missed the party on Friday night. Then I got online and started reading various people's LJs, jumping back and forth, finding all sorts of interesting people talking about ... all kinds of things, including all the panels I missed (duh, aforementioned desire to be three places at once). I really hope I can get more involved with these folks; they remind me of what I've missed since I left off working at Aradia. Feminists! People of color! Science fiction! The Buffyverse! Terry Pratchett! And, of course, Ellen Klages, whose auctioneering skills are simply without peer. I would post a picture of her in a mustache doing the Happy Dance Of Reaching a $100 Bid, but we are having photoshop problems at the moment, so perhaps later. I bought both Wiscon Chronicles 1 and 2, The Green Glass Sea, Marque and Reprisal, the comic book collection of Buffy Season 8 #1-5 which I didn't know about, Zahrah the Windseeker and a bunch more I've forgotten, plus I've got a long list of stuff to order because I didn't want to carry it all home.

In art news, working on painting of Tim at the moment. He is shirtless, leaning an elbow on a yellow book on a desk, writing on a white pad with the other hand, and looking very GQ. I would post a pic of that painting in progress except, as I mentioned, PhotoShop not talking to my camera atm. So, later. The painting I did before, of Quinn's naked torso, is mostly done although I have to re-work a couple of gray spots on her breastbone and thigh, and Kimberly wants me to put it in the end-of-year student show, so I am excited about that. Going off now, in fact, to think about that.

Went to the 43rd District Democratic Caucus in Seattle on Sunday. It was a zoo! There were about 1300 people there trying to fit into a 1000 seat high school auditorium. I am pretty sure the fire codes were not observed :). But boy, was it great! Hundreds of people of all shapes, sizes, colors and persuasions. People in wheelchairs, people with babies, people with buttons of all kinds. Old people with canes, new people with binkies. The Hillary delegates were LOUD and PROUD. The Obama delegates were LOUDER ... but I gotta say, proportional to headcount, the Hillary delegates were amazingly scrappy. We heard speeches from each candidate's surrogate -- and the Obama and Kucinich surrogates were local people, but the Clinton campaign sent Sean Astin, a.k.a. Sam Gamgee, to plug Hillary. It was an interesting choice; I'm not sure he's cut out for public speaking, but he basically hit the "experience" and "strength" notes as required. At 1:00 (I'd been there since 9 and the caucus officially opened at 10:07) they announced, "The hot dog stand outside is down to its last 150 dogs," and there was a small stampede. Since my delegate vote had already been counted, I decided to bail at that point, since next up was delegate selection to the next convention, and that was going to take forever. There were dozens of would-be delegates, each of whom had thirty seconds to make their bid! So I don't know who went on to the next level, but I really enjoyed having been there. (And I would have enjoyed it far less without Matt's Kindle to play with during the parliamentary-procedures stuff...yay!)

One of the best things about Marcus is his laugh. He still laughs like a child, with a completely unconscious, utterly contagious hilarity. He giggles and chortles. The first time he saw the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in "Ghostbusters" he laughed and laughed and laughed, tears streaming, clutching his stomach, the whole thing.

The other day he came across the word "Scheisse!" in something he was reading in the car and asked Matt what it meant and Matt said it meant "poop." Marcus cracked up. Then Matt, being Matt, pointed out that it is fun to swear in German because it sounds so good, and another good swear would might be "Scheinhund!" Marcus cracked up again. He came home yelling from the top of the stairs, "Rabbit! Rabbit! Scheisse! Schweinhund! Shleisshun! Scheinsche! Poop! Pig-dog!" amid gales of laughter, staggering around drunkenly. He had just managed to calm down by the time he was half way through his snack about ten minutes later when Matt walked up behind him, leaned over and (in falsetto) yelled "Schweinhund!!!" Marcus promptly snorted milk out his nose and all over the floor.

Here are a couple of recent portraits. "Rachel" is an oil painting from Beginning Figure Painting. I don't recall exactly but I think she sat for 4 sessions, or 12 hours. I think she is my most successful painting so far, at least in terms of getting the colors and the composition close to real life and aesthetically pleasing.


"Caroline" is a pastel painting. We were supposed to emphasize the very light hues, and the contrast with her hair and the dark trim on her dress, in imitation of the Klimt and other early modern work (posted previously). To my mind, she seems a bit insipid, but that goes with the style a bit. I was very happy with the bouquet of flowers, as flowers are not my strong suit.

As a followup to the Klimt white painting master copy, we were supposed to do a self-portrait "in the style of" the white paintings. Here is mine. I call it "My Grandmother, My Self." I don't know that I can really envision myself sitting for a portrait with my hair up and a white high-collared blouse on (I used a turtleneck), but perhaps a turn-of-the-century Japanese immigrant bride did. I'm channeling her.

I'm taking two classes at the moment: the second part of Foundation Figure Painting, and a class in Pastel Portraits. For the first one, the homework was to paint a self portrait in oil. Here's the second layer. It's still in progress, obviously. I started with a pink and green (red/green complementary color) base, and decided my face was way too pink and not yellow enough, so for the second layer I took the dark pink paint, added a bunch of cadmium yellow, and then added in more white to lighten it up again. The chin needs more green still, that'll be layer 3, and the background needs to be dulled (the sheet behind me was white, with kind of light umber shadows) and the shirt needs work but I hate drapery :)



For Pastel Portraits, we're currently working on a portrait of a model named Caroline who has dark brown hair and pale olive skin -- sort of Mediterranean coloring -- in a light colored dress against light pastel backgrounds. There's a whole bunch of turn-of-the-century work in a similar vein -- you can look up "white portraits" of Whistler, Sargent, Klimt and others -- so homework was to copy one of the master works. I picked a Klimt (yes, it's Klimt, even though it looks like a cross between Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha) to copy. Here it is. Some hat, eh?
Here is the original Klimt.

This is from Suzanne Brooker's workshop, Drawing Portraits of Trees, from August 2007. We sat on the grass in the Seattle Arboretum and drew trees for a week. It was lovely. Suzanne is very exacting, and she definitely had a lot of critiques for all of us. This tree is one that I worked on in the early morning when the sun was right for about four mornings.

Here's the final project from fall's Foundation Painting class. We worked on this painting for four sessions of 3 hours each. I think the most successful part is the frontmost foot and shin crossing over the rear foot; it looks very 3-D and realistic. I'm pretty happy with the red glow on the left torso from light bouncing off the cloth onto the model, and with the colors in the breasts and torso, and with the way the curtain in the backdrop disappears into the dark upper left corner. Things I don't like: the right arm is too orange, the drapery is awkward, the face is VERY awkward, and I never managed to finish the floor.

Here are three charcoal drawings from the recent workshop I attended with Juliette Aristides. She teaches the classical atelier at Gage, which is a 4 year (!!) full-time drawing and painting program from which you emerge painting like, I don't know, Caravaggio or someone. I can't manage that commitment, but I CAN do a weeklong workshop, so I did.

This is a two day study of Sarah, the female model. Total hours worked is probably about 4-5. Natural lighting (limited because it was January).

This is a two day study of Richard, the male model. Again, natural lighting and total hours worked around 4-5.

Finally, this is a three or four day study of Sarah; I can't remember exactly, but total hours worked around 8-10 maybe. It's much more contrasty than the others because in addition to using vine charcoal I also used compressed charcoal, which makes a much blacker mark, in order to get the heavy shadows around her figure. She is leaning on an invisible cushion, in case you were wondering ;-p

Matt got me one of those turntables with a USB port that can convert all my old records which have been stored in the closet for 15 years into MP3 files! I am so happy! I'm sitting here listening to a recording of Malcolm Dalglish playing hammer dulcimer with Grey Larsen, circa 1977, which is just awesome! Yayayayaya!

I also got a truly kick-butt bumper sticker to add to my collection, courtesy of Lauri: TAILGATE ME AND ROLL FOR DAMAGE. Bwahahaha! She also loaded me down with tons of cool Fimo art and mosaic books for inspiration.

The kids, as usual, got too much stuff and lost interest several times; the cats enjoyed the tissue paper; much leftover turkey was consumed; a good time was had by all.