Something in His Eye

I am not sue what happened here - I will leave any interpretation up to yourselves, but I think I have given you enough clues in the past few weeks. If you want some help then you will have to email me to ask.

Obviously this is Vic again. I really am enjoying this rather anal dedication to the study of his face, as well as his neck musculature and also his lapels. Great lapels there!

Ears as well. i have always had trouble with ears, but through dedication and close study I am starting to get the hang of them. When I am brushing my teeth and applying my face cream in the morning I find myself studying the parts of my own ears very closely as well and find to my amazement that there is actually very little difference between my ears and Vic's. Although ironically this painting has no ears in it at all - which rather makes this paragraph a bit pointless!

The progress with each painting is of course the most important thing to me at the moment. If I was not looking for improvement then I would have moved on to the next thing by this time, printing or medal making, but for some reason I seem to have the bit well and truly between my teeth and working really hard at the laying on of paint. Also I am trying to whittle away the caricature look in these portraits and I am happy to say that I think this one succeeds in this where the first ones definitely did not. Progress is always so satisfying don't you think.

Other progress is in the laying on of paint - I was especially happy with the jacket in this painting. I found it very satisfying to combine the reds and blues together and create one unified whole - or so i think. i did use a bit of pen and ink at the end, just along the bottom of the picture, but that was more to create a balance of ink across the whole picture. For the colour it was not necessary.

I have just finished a book about a little girl who throughout her growing up spends a lot of her time drawing and making things and basically living in a visual world. I was impressed with the way the author managed to describe a lot of things that I describe in this blog on a regular basis and also some of the things that I have yet to speak about, but have experienced and feel. She too spoke about the development of her art, not in such an aware way as I do here - because obviously I am much older, but in the way that most of us experience life and living at the time we are doing it - much more intuitively. As I dwell on it the book impresses me more and more as I can completely identify with the girl's development as an artist. Not her life, as that was a million miles away from the life I have lived so far.

I mention this here because reading about the journey (so well articulated) of another artist validates the importance of the work that I do. I could see how important it was in her life and that helps to make me feel that my life and my work is important too.

Sometimes I do not feel so worthy - but today I do and when i write my blog it makes me think about what I am doing in my work, which must be good.

So, if this picture is called "Something in his Eye" then this entry and indeed my whole blog and my whole life really could be called "Something in my Mind's Eye"