Portrait of me

Usually I'm painting other people.  Today -- or rather for the last couple of months -- my friend John Hampshire has been painting me ...

This, it should be noted, is a work in progress.  Or at least that's my assumption.  Knowing when to stop is always a challenge.

John is both tremendously talented and an excellent person to have a beer with.  These two things don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, I can promise you.  And his portraits actually look like the people he's painting, so I suppose I should hang out with him more and maybe some of that will ooze over to my side.

My favorite works by him are large-scale, emotionally-fraught black and white landscapes which he renders in pen and ink (or maybe very thin Sharpies, or maybe the modern version of Rapidographs -- remember them?).   He calls them labyrinths, I think, and there's usually a tornado brewing.  Check this out ...

He's also famous for his Flag Day party (which is coming in about four days), but that's a story for another time.