Yes, you read that right, 1988. I’m sharing it with you because it’s almost Valentine’s day and because I still think it’s funny. My brother, Harris, and I loved to collaborate on projects. Especially when they were either intellectual or goofy. We made a “radio show” on audio tape when we were 7 and 9 years old and then later, we made some video movies. This was a storyboard for a commercial idea we had for conversation hearts. I miss you, baby brother! Happy Heart Day.
Revisiting Older Works
Sketchbook Throwback, “I called her, Max…”
I am tragically unhip. I don’t even GET the concept of the Throwback Thursday so I’m not even going to attempt to prove how square I am. Yes I said square. I just so like the sound of Throwback Thursday that I want to do it my way. So keeping with the theme of my year of looking back and going forward, I will now do a sketchbook throwback every so often (but not more than one a week). I was always a lousy sketcher but a fairly prolific ponderer. So sometimes the text is going to be a lot more interesting than the image. I suspect that will happen pretty often, actually. You see, I used to know everything.
This page appears to be from that very prolific year, 1995. I have no idea where the text came from. Maybe someone said it to me. maybe I copied it from somewhere. Maybe I made it up. The only thing I am quite sure about is that I wasn’t talking about anyone in particular. But I like the sound of it now.
“I called her, Max. Just to let her know I was here if she needed me. I’ve always been here for her. She’s just never chosen to need me. I wonder if things haven’t been better off for the two of us that way… We’re beyond being unalike. But that really hasn’t much to do with loving somebody.”
The Filled Heart Part 4
I first painted this image during in my purple & silhouetted people phase. So probably in 1995. The original was done in watercolor and acrylic on a brown paper shopping bag. The image is of a woman looking to fill the void inside herself that was left when she lost her heart. She is choosing to replace it with a new heart symbolizing love. I’m pretty sure I did this one after a breakup. I was in my early 20’s. Everything was much grander back then. So a breakup was kind of epic.
At any rate, in 2003, I updated it in order to enter a small Valentine’s card competition (it won). I recreated the image digitally in order to make it into a template so I could construct it into three-dimensional layers using cardboard.
In 2005, I went back to the rough digital and cleaned it up to make it available for sale on Greeting Card Universe. The inside of the GCU card reads, “Of every heart, I choose yours. Be my Valentine” I realize it’s a bit of an odd image for a Valentine’s Day card. Conveniently, it went along with the Illustration Friday topic that week, Choose.
And now here we are in 2014, almost 20 years later. This little image has become part of my Goddess pendant collection that I used to sell on Etsy.
Four Girls in a Paris Flat
Continuing my project of bringing my older works up to date…
I’m really not sure if this piece ever had a title. It’s one of the few times I ever painted myself though. That’s me, the one in the long red skirt and beret. I’m pretty sure that braid was my trademark some 20-odd years ago, not that I ever knew it. My grandfather pointed it out to me once when I met him and my grandmother in Paris in 1992. I was studying theatre in London that semester and my grandparents took their last trip to Europe together, in part revisiting places where my grandfather had been stationed during and after the war. He described me coming up the street towards him with an enormous backpack and my pigtail swinging gaily behind.
It was during this semester that B came to visit my roommate in our London flat. B is the blonde on the right. Ever baking and concocting strange things in the kitchen, and even stranger plans. That was when I first met her but this painting is really of B’s apartment in Paris where I visited her a few years later. She was originally from Pittsburgh but moved to Paris after college and never looked back. She and I are no longer in touch, but the week I spent with her in that apartment, where I also met M (bottom right) and S (top left) made for some excellent 20-something bohemian artist-style adventures. We dressed funny. We went on crazy picnics in the park. We hired a car and drove to to the sea, and to Chartres where we lay on the floor looking up at the beautiful glass windows (I don’t think we were even asked NOT to!). And M and I bought a 3 day museum pass that had us touring the Paris sewers as well as Chopin’s house in our effort to see as many as possible.
M and I also spent an afternoon visiting with all the dead artists and Abelard and Helouise at Pere Lachaise. We never did find Jim Morrison though. I was much more interested in Delacroix.
That day I regaled M with all the grand ideas I had for my future. I had recently moved to Los Angeles. I had famous friends. I’d spent a summer working on a charity project for a mega movie star. I had plans. Or so I thought. what I had, in fact, was a muddle. I had no real direction and no plans at all, really, I kept taking the paths life was throwing at me instead. But I did have a lot of fun, angst, more adventures and, ultimately, experience.
Which brings me back here, revisiting my former artistic self like reading old letters.
Artistic notes about this piece: I painted the entire background before I overlaid the subjects which is why the placement is a little wonky and I have my hand in a candle flame. I thought about fixing it but figured it was probably allegorical. The background elements are all objects, patterns, and pictures from the flat. B really did try to paint the gardens of Versailles on one wall of the living room. She hadn’t finished it when I was there. Perhaps it’s all painted over now.
Purple People #03
Continuing my project of bringing my older works up to date… This was the second of a series of acrylics I did back in 1995 that I called, “The Purple People.”
I did the original sketch for this piece on a trip to Israel in 1993. I was actually recovering from mononucleosis at the time so I wasn’t 100% in my focus but it seemed to me there were way too many memorials all over the place and that we were visiting pretty much all of them. This piece is pretty simplistic so I’ll let it speak for itself. And unfortunately, it’s theme is always current.
Purple People #02
Continuing my project of bringing my older works up to date… This was the second of a series of acrylics I did back in 1995 that I called, “The Purple People.”
This painting is completely and unapologetically my rendition of the Sting song, Fields of Gold. I honestly don’t know the story behind the song, so this is the story I told. A young couple meet and fall in love. But they’re not in the same time and place for happily ever after. The man wishes to go off and see the world and the woman gives her heart to go along with him. But he doesn’t come back in a timely fashion. The woman does not want to be alone. She marries a man who loves her even though her heart is still absent. They do have a happy life together with children and grandchildren. He dies with a life complete. The woman, now old, takes satisfaction in watching her grandchildren grow and play and in the last years of her life, her heart returns. The man has returned from seeing the world with it’s weightiness behind him on his back and finally gives the woman his heart for good.
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