Still Life

It may look as though my output has been prodigious of late, but I actually painted 'Lost Hopes' and drew 'Powder and Paint' yesterday; this, which I haven't given any title to other than 'Still Life' I created just after lunch today.

Full of bagel and pain au chocolat I got to thinking about art classes at secondary school, where the whole purpose of the curriculum seemed to be to either draw a dying yucca plant or imitate aboriginal art at the instigation of the pretty cool Mr Trendberth, an Australian exchange teacher.

So here's my take on those tedious, wasted hours spent drawing a living plant in its death throes; this was rendered in ink and acrylic on a canvas roughly 12" by 10" in size.

Powder and Paint

While I was waiting for the first layer of paint on 'Lost Hopes' to dry, I googled some images and found one of a young woman with an elaborate hairstyle (check the original image out here: http://www.more-hairstyles.com/prom/p16.jpg).

This got me thinking; so much of what we are is artifice; women cover themselves in cosmetics to appear different to how genetics made them, and men and women alike try to project an image to the world of who they want to be perceived as....at the end of the day, we're all just powder and paint aren't we?

So I doodled this on Daler Rowney black HB portrait paper with a Derwent inktense pencil, scarlet ink and oil pastel.

Apologies to the young lady in the picture if I've portrayed her in an unflattering manner; feel free to contact me and ask for me to remove this if this is you.

Lost Hope

Jeez.....where to begin? Been on a bit of an emotional roller-coaster lately; my girlfriend was meant to be coming over for 2 blissful weeks next week, but unfortunately the British Embassy decided that she's some sort of potential absconder and denied her a visa. The reasons they gave were weak, and this led to me being unable to stop crying and having to take a day off work because I was emotionally fragile and also drunk.
But, me being me, I decided to turn this into something creative, so here's an abstract based on the emotions I felt at the time; it's acrylic, leaf skeletons and ink on 24" x 30" canvas, with the application methods being palette knives, brushes, fingers, and direct from the tube/bottle.