Inverted Keynes

And so the spectacle begins.  John Maynard Keynes.  June 1883 to May 1946.  Manoman, for a man who died in 1946 we sure talk about him alot.

The urge to make a Maynard G. Krebbs joke must be almost overpowering.
Almost.  But Keynes is some serious shit.
So he is.

For those of you not in the loop, he looks like this ...

A ten months ago I did a study of the man, inverted, as a quick Artrage sketch ...

 Now that we're serious, he looks like this ...

Quick note:  People ask me if I paint my inverted paintings upside-down.  Which, on some level, would be right-side up.  That being the inverse of 'inverted'.  But the fact of the matter is, I don't think of them as being inverted one way or another as I paint them.  Most of it happens with the canvas on the floor and me walking around it.  So there is no particular top or bottom.

Theatre in the round
Nicely said.

No particular top or bottom until, that is, I write the words "Inverted Keynes" across the bottom.  Then it becomes pretty clear what is happening.

Actually that's not right.  Once the image clarifies on the floor and I start putting it on the easel and squeezing direct from the tube, or via my thumb, I tend to position it in the inverted position (i.e. the way it will eventually hang) more often than the standard view.

But I do rotate it quite a bit.

So I guess it all depends.  But that's not what I'm here to talk about.  I'm here to talk about how, much to my embarrassment, I did my initial charcoal sketch about six inches (or one grid square, if you look closely and see that the canvas is divided into a grid) higher than I had intended.  So then I had to move everything down.

This was galling.  And then when I started gessoing the incorrect image out, the charcoal started to bleed and everything started to turn gray in ways that were counterproductive.  At this point, I'm ashamed to say, I turned and hurled my paintbrush at the opposite wall.

Really, that sort of thing is extraordinarily unlike me.  I apologize.