It has arrived safely in New Orleans,hooray! Also, I managed to upload a detail of it so everyone can see what a canvas hog I was (altho it's not as hoggy as it looks). Well this is really exciting! Off the subject, it snowed a little here today. Eww. Not ready for that. Ever. The only upside is that it's nice to come home from work, jump into the old sweats, park my carcass on the couch with a sketchbook, crochet hooks, laptop, or a good book to read, and a steamy pot of the old milky chai, and look at how awful it is on the outside while the furnace merrily blows hot air into the INside. Brought some work home with me today, but guess what? Who cares?

re-ossified the skull a bit, added a gothy looking jacket and corrected the eyeball as much as possible with my poor up-close vision. That part really sucks. The lack of good vision. Well it is what it is, and it's ready to move on to the next person. I've used a lavish amount of canvas, considering there are nine more people to come after me,and I'm sorry about that. I'm looking forward to seeing what the other artists will do with this. It will be interesting to see how much remains of this starting point after the tenth person finishes. This has made me remember how much I used to love to paint. I can't even remember why I quit doing it. I'm out of practice, and that's a bit frustrating, but it was coming back pretty quickly. I guess I'll scribble some thoughts in the familiar brown moleskine that came with the canvas, and send it on it's way tomorrow.

Ok, reading the drivel that I wrote here a couple days ago makes my eyes hurt. I wonder if there's any way of doing something creative, putting it where people can see it, and not subsequently knifing yourself in the foregut later for having been so blind, brazen, or full of yourself? It's been a long time since I've picked up a paintbrush, and while I was never a Max Ernst or Francisco Goya back in the day, I seem to have lost whatever mojo I had going for me in the days of yore. My original thought with this canvas...first of all I never counted on getting it first, so I had no pre-concieved notions about what to put on it. Once I got it I had to start getting some notions and quickly. Having just finished a short class on forensic drawing less than a week before the canvas arrived, I was all excited about this really fascinating subject. We got to see lots of examples of facial reconstructions and so forth, and ickily enough, one morgue photo of a young murder victim that looked eerily like my own son. I'm having a hard time shaking that image. Anyway, my first thought was to wash in a sort of bones-out sort of underpainting of a human face. It was a nice thought, too, and it looked lovely and professional and striking where it took form behind my dreaming eyelids. Got out the old anatomy book, put the pencil to the paper, and the usual sad story unfolded; my vision vastly exceeds my skill. Well, in all fairness, if I had given myself the benefit of more than one ten-minute go at it, I'm sure it would have had a much more satisfactory ending. As it is, however, a very different kind of painting emerged than I had anticipated. My creative output seems to run in themes; for quite some time I've been in the midst of the theme of Screaming. Looking at and trying to re-create the horror behind a scream by exaggerating the facial musculature involved in the act of screaming, the body language, etc. Lest anyone is picturing nuanced daVinci-esque studies of people roiling with internal pain, I will set the record straight and say that I've been working only in pencil and pen, and the drawings are profoundly NOT daVinci-esque. And of course, the horror behind my own scream (one of them) is that people will not even consider them (drawings) art. So, in an effort to find a grounding point, and to switch off the "word-making" part of my brain so that the picture-making part might come magically to life, I wrote a statement about words that formed the basis for my part of this project. The statement concerns the nature of utterances which seem to be born of their own will, and are of such frightening power that they can literally scare the utterer to death. The image that came forth, looks, to my unspeakable dismay, more comical than angst-ridden. Perhaps it's the too-long, thin neck, or the ugly green sweater, or the palette that didn't come out quite like I'd hoped. Whichever, I'll need to do something before sending it out.