Elena in the Morning

"Elena in the Morning" looks like this:



Two things strike me as being of interest here. First, instead of inscribing my typical one-foot grid with charcoal, I lay twine across the surface of the canvas (already stretched in this instance) and gessoed it into place.

Second, I then painted the surface a reddish-brown. This may not seem like much to you, but up until Elena, every painting I've done in this style has been executed on a neutral canvas. Let me tell you, painting the damned thing brown changes the whole game.

The image itself was then recorded by dribbling black paint on top of the brown. Yellows, blues, some pink...but mostly black. I like her face and the impressionistic feel to the painting. It doesn't look as much like the woman herself (I've painted her before), but when I showed it to her I referenced the famous line Picasso fed Gertrude Stein.

"It doesn't look like me," she said.
"It will," he replied.

I am entranced, if I do say so myself, with how the one-inch strands of unpainted yarn extend into space beyond the stretched canvas, creating the impression of a frame.