Self-Portrait Study 3, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite, oils, India and acrylic inks.
In the Moleskine, the earlier sketch in this blog this month. (No, I never ever wear eyeliner like that, not in my whole life. Anyway, it's a self portrait that is its own painting and only has some resemblance to me.)
I wanted it to have something beyond itself, be piercing somehow, and even be hard to look at. Somewhat disheveled and distorted, a sadness there, the more difficult realities of our experience, I guess.
In the initial sketch, I wasn't trying to draw a 'self-portrait' for anyone else, only trying to draw what I saw in this little, round magnifying mirror that was somewhat distorting but at least I could see detail without readers. The woman in the sketch had a 'sad and stricken' look, as one commenter wrote.
In the finished painting you see here, in her eyes I hope there is concern, compassion, fear, sadness, hope, love, remembrance, and the wild ride that life is, with its inexplicable ups and downs, its times of plenty and times of drought.
Leonard Cohen, in a CBC interview I heard last Sunday afternoon, spoke about how we are all, in one way or another, trying to align our will with Divine Will. I'd call the latter, fate, fortune, life, the way it goes, the Tao.
The woman in the painting is caught right in the crux of moment between individual will and that of the life force, aligning an acceptance of fate, of karma, of whatever the forces are, and perhaps learning that allowing the horror of the pain is an empowerment in itself.
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