- Published on
"Sara" - acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas, 16 x 20 x 1.5. Ready to hang (Sides are painted; no need to frame. Hanging wire is attached). Available here and at Artfinder.
So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can't plant me in your penthouse
I'm going back to my plough
Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh, I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road
- from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
Last week in the Expressive Portraits course we worked from vintage photographs - victorian women, coal miners, stoic, gritty faces which told countless stories. In order to get my muse in a nostalgic mode, I queued up a playlist of songs from my youth - the kind that take me back and have me wondering how, a few notes into a song from the past, I can find tears in my eyes and feel transported into feelings of my much younger self.
And that is a nice place to visit - but I don't want to linger there. Just mine it for gold. Or yellow bricks.
Sara
How can we take the fodder of our yesterday and turn it into rich, loamy soul for our older, wiser souls? How do we hang onto the exquisite moments of long ago and yet allow room for growth, expansion and unfettered exploration? This song, a remake of a classic, is a perfect demonstration of just that.
We can hold on loosely, allow the song, the lyric, the memory to breathe - expand, contract, expand again - until it becomes something new, grown from the soil of sweetness and nostalgia. And so I am opening my hands, relaxing my fingers, allowing...
About the art: beginning with a drawing in stabilo pencil and charcoal, jumping off to a canvas and allowing the paint to create happy accidents and textures, and also allowing the woman in the painting to define herself. In the drawing, an electric eraser was used to create vertical texture. In the painting, the same effect using a catalyst wedge through wet paint. Titled after singer Sara Bareilles, I think this one took something old and made it new, too.
the lips / the mouth / their expressiveness; the asymmetries; the collar!; the contrast of soft/blurred with sharply defined: yes, yes, yes, yes
AND the mystery and magic that come from covering each vertical half of this portrait in turn and seeing two different people, then returning to the merger of the halves: wow