I Could Not Be More Fucked Up!

This, I suppose, is the usual mid-process whining that you, dear reader, have to suffer through whenever I'm having second thoughts about a painting.

Which is virtually always, whilst in the middle of things.

Truth be told, I liked the image I showed you yesterday--the "half way there" one. Although Big Rupert looked a little like the aging Sinatra. But hey, did you ever listen to "In the wee small hours of the evening"? I'm not a big Sinatra fan, but that one, plus "Only The Lonely" (note: all titles approximate) give you a sense of what all the shouting was about.

Anyway, consider this:



It is the square containing Rupert's left eye, cropped from yesterday's image. It is, if I do say so myself, a classic Geoff Raymond eye. This said, of course, with the understanding that that weird blue triangle above his eye will be dealt with accordingly.

For the sake of comparison, here's the square containing Robert E. Lee's left eye--another classic:



Now consider this--the square, painted today, containing Murdoch's right eye:



I don't know about you, but the words "I could not be more fucked up" certainly do run through my mind. First of all, they are quite a distance from eachother on the color chart. Now granted, this one should be lighter since it's closer to the light source. But still, it looks awfully vanilla to me. Lacks the sharpness of the first squares drippings. But really... it just seems too vanilla.

Likewise, what's with that upper lip? I mean, how big is it supposed to be before somebody builds a condominium on it? I'm trying to think of somebody with a really big upper lip. All I can come up with is the Cowardly Lion. Which, now that I think about it, is about right.

Now, as you probably can remember, the visual experience derived from seeing the left one butted up against the right one in the final painting is called dynamic disjunction. I am not sure America is ready for this much disjunction.

Also, how more screwed up could his eyeglass frames be?

What's that old saying? Denial heals all wounds? Maybe when I finally slap the thing together (which should be tomorrow), everything will work out. And all this is not to say that there won't be a fair amount of heavy lifting, paint-wise, once the tape comes off. But I'm worried.

That said, worried or not, either way, I'm going to drag my butt out to Liberty Street on Monday and the chips will fall where they may.

This, for the record, is where we currently stand: