Post #950

Look how close we're getting to a thousand. That will be a day, dear reader. That will be a day.

Anyway, back to this whole Ash Wednesday thing. I offer for your viewing pleasure, "Lilah S. (Ash Wednesday)":



Lilah's a big one. Six by five and really quite lovely in the flesh:



You can still catch her in person, if I'm not mistaken, at Elmo on Tuesday nights.

Interesting lips, wonderful collection of planes and curves.



And really, a state-of-the-art flume.



Lilah would probably be fun to sculpt.

And here's a detail from the painting:



When I first finished it I stared at the in-your-face feeling of the lips, wondered if I should tone them down, finally didn't. But they really don't quite look like they belong with the rest of the painting. Who cares, I suppose.

Anyway, I still wrestle with my urge to goober on an actual ash on her forehead. The painting, by way of explanation, was finished on Ash Wednesday of maybe 2003. When I first mentioned the idea to her, she resisted. These days, though, I'm feeling more and more like I should just do it.

And check this out: "Lilah S." was one of the first paintings I ever took outside to just show off. Here we are set up below the Greenway, if that's what they call the soon-to-be-opened elevated city park, on perhaps West 22nd street.



This from what art historians will call, someday, "The Formative Years." It wasn't too many jumps from the above pastoral to painting Rupert Murdoch and pitching him up outside The Wall Street Journal. Nor that many more steps to the media circus that surrounded my Fuld painting (or, perhaps more accurately, the environment in which I displayed my Fuld painting).

So this is how things work. Hmmm.