492--Perhaps I'm not making myself clear...

This would not be unusual--a lack of clarity. Although, in my defense, trying to translate what is both a sensual and cerebral but definitely not verbal experience, like painting, into clear prose is not without its challenges.

Please--thanks are not necessary. But it is amazing to me that I've hung in for some 492-odd posts, here at TYOMP, trying in each one to do just that. Well, maybe half. There's that whole jumping into the abyss, swimming upstream, eating the snakes thing that may have nothing to do with painting. Then again, that may be more about painting than all the painting stuff.

You think this shit is easy?

Anyway, back to the case in point:



(First of all, it annoys me that I rotated this image in iPhoto so you, dear reader, can benefit from looking at the image from the same perspective I plan to continue painting it from (vertical), but it won't stick when I import it to Blogger--a service I'm falling less in love with everyday.)

For starters you can see that with a couple of goobers of white on my thumb I've corrected the gross problems with the chin. But even as I do so, and likewise, as I plan to turn this lumpy orange thing into a face worthy of a fallen angel, I know for a fact that conflict between at least four different squares will lessen, if not disappear entirely. And, one has to ask, does the trade-off between generating a more pleasing image of the face trump the excitement of the visual disjunction?

Every bone in my body says my boy Picasso would hang onto the lines, face not withstanding. The difference between us? Picasso was a Giant. Me? I'm a Giant fan.



This is, of course, the ultimate Giant in an intimate moment.

So if the idea is to ape Picasso (troubling moment of self-realization here), then do I go about correcting the painting in a manner that artificially preserves the grid? Cleaning up and re-enacting (like some idiot running around the hills of Gettysburg dressed like a Confederate soldier), for your viewing pleasure, lines that don't match up; improbable color variations; shit that just makes you scratch your head and wonder what I was drinking that night? All the disjunctive characteristics we've both, you and I, come to love? Am I that big a whore?

Here's a joke.
Okay, I could use one.
Picture a policeman with his gun drawn; he has the drop on a prostitute and an extremely large potato.
Okay.
The cop shouts: "Okay, which of you is the hooker?"
The potato shouts back: "Idaho."