Progress

My day nurse, Wanda, just left after her daily visits to monitor my progress. I've never been a morning person and having to get up at 8 in the morning would normally have been a major annoying pain in the booteh, but the combination of minor pain, the realization that every minute is one I should be aware of rather than sleep through and Wanda's pleasant, calming personality make facing the mornings a bit easier. As always I'm hoping my body will get the message and rework it's inner clock so that I do indeed become a morning person. Of course, this ain't gonna happen, but I'm not going to dwell on it. Just glad to be up and relatively pain-free (thank you percocet).

Narcotic or not, possible dependence on said narcotic be damned, I am so much happier, so much more comfortable, so much less brittle in my emotions just from the one pill that I can't help being both thankful and bitter about the whole pain-management thing.

Anyway, no one wants to hear about this anymore. It's been said already, I just can't get over what a difference its made. For example; I painted last night. I'd been fiddling with the idea, even putting some minimal slashes of color on a canvas.











These are just work in progress (WIP) shots and are by no means at all how the final piece will look, which is why I tend to not put up wip images. I had an image in my head and worked it up using some reference, but the concept was to take that image, which had a vague feeling of freedom and defiance coupled with the flying hair, and meld it with other symbolist images like the owl in flight. I'm waffling between keeping the owl face on the woman and overlapping it further to add more layers to her "personality". Snakes, goddesses, angelic wings and demonic scales. We'll see. I suspect what you see here will be all but obliterated in the process, whcih is the other reason I take pics of them.

All this even led as far as re-working an older painting I wasn't pleased with and adding an oil glaze to another to warm it up.










The nude needs some more work, but basically I had to give her a breast reduction, as the ones she had previously were too large and had no 'feel' to them. They drew too much attention away from the rest of the image and were also feeling rather light and frivolous as opposed to the overall darkness of the image.

The profile portrait was originally over a flat grey background and that uncommitted, emotionless color was holding the image back. Now its a bit warmer and feels less dead. I'll probably add a few more glazes to it for the depth it needs to make her rise above the flatness of that background.