Blake Man briefly became The Homeless Man, but now he's PRIMAL MAN

Primal Man, Brenda Clews, 2012, 24" x 18", 60cm x 45cm, charcoal, acrylic ink, oil paint on 90lb archival paper.

Now that I understand how important 'Optimism' is (I listened to a PODCAST), I understand I must shelve this drawing's original meaning...

Bye, bye the desperations in what I originally wrote:

I want it to be quite painful to look at, to get at feeling this... vulnerability, desperation, a hostile world internally and externally, loss ...perhaps a veteran suffering from PTSD, perhaps this is his nightmare. ...And yet. there is blue sky, patches of green grass in the dry yellow. While he seems almost praying or acknowledging the difficulties of the forces about him in a bowed position, and even insurmountably crawling forward, he also connects deeply to the ground on 'all fours.' In my sense of it, he draws energy for existence itself from the earth.

He is homeless; he has nothing, shorn of all trappings; he is still human. He maintains his dignity.

Hello another, more 'positive' meaning. Primal Man, meaning I leave it up to you, the viewer, to figure it out if you are at all so inclined.

I'm not sure about the tree above his head - though I had planned this evergreen tree from the moment I conceived him, and it's exactly as I imagined it would be in paint, a bit crude and child-like, not too neat, a little Emily Carr but not too much, sharing with the colour of the Canadian Mounties, no less.

Okay, never mind what I say. Since when is the artist the best person to talk about a painting?

See yesterday's sketch for an earlier description of what was in my mind with this painting.