I have been worrying about the bumble bee effect of the suit for several days now, ever since I painted it.  This type of problem I simply cannot approach with my head, as much as I do try.  I have the panting sitting on an easel at the bottom of my bed and I stare at it or I catch it in the corner of my eye 1000 times a day.  I am waiting for it to become part of my unconsciousness...and finally today, in a massive day long free falling session, I suddenly decided to paint everything orange and I absolutely love it.  I also turned the image on it's side and now it all works for me.  The entire surface  is wet and I can't go near it (I used my Milanese oils and they take forever) so next session I will only  attempt to glaze the flesh a bit and finish the hair...but not tomorrow....tomorrow I seem to be hosting a party for 20 teens, God help me!!!

legs, feet , and bracelets tomorrow...

Falling...I picked up my brush and just started painting, preceded by three days of staring at some drawn lines,  now the dress...can't even remember what exactly I had outlined, the canvas had laid there for so long unfinished...and now, all of the sudden, it is I who is falling, just like when the brain allows the eye to rule, the hand to wonder knowingly, relinquishing all control, it is a physical feeling of falling through space, slightly unpleasant, certainly exhilarating, strangely uncomfortable...I am falling through space, I am looking down...is  it my body?  is that my leg? what is below?   I want to define a space which engulfs and distorts but is not water, but reality...I am still searching for what it is...the clothes will be a swirling dress, lined and dispersing all around.

In the meantime, my quest for a consistent reality continues and with more solid flesh in the arms and face vivian's body is beginning to take shape as a whole...
I am very pleased with the forehead, the arms and the cheeks.  I have projected really good light onto the left cheek and excellent reflected light onto the right cheek.  I have studied plenty of shadow to light transitions and noted the band of bright warm color that separates the light from the dark.  Even the projected shadow of the head onto the neck and chest is quite believable now, but still I have to go a bit more shallow.  I have carried the suit patterns up onto the left (my left) shoulder and done a bit more work on the hair to indicate the direction of light.  I have made the lips narrower and more believable and I am frankly impressed with the beauty of the floating lights on the right cheek, a momentary stroke of genius, or maybe just a stroke that caused me to see spots, not sure.
what is still giving me pause now is the shadow area of the face, particularly the eye sockets and the projected nose shadow...."form shadows are blurred, cast shadows are sharp"...keep repeating the mantra, maybe it will sink in.

I have no idea why my visual reality tends to fragment so into particle size matter even as I observe it to describe it, but whenever I stare at something it tends to come alive into a million tiny live shapes, each one demanding its own little individual portrait.  I do some reading (though rarely understand) bits and pieces about quantum theory and string theory and it seems to make perfect visual sense to me that that is just the way things are in my world.  My subjects simply dissolve beneath my gaze, dissected by my very observation.
This process, however, subsequently requires a rather lengthy reconstruction process.  So much time could be saved if I could skip this step...but it is fundamental in formulating form in its recognizably solid state!!! otherwise I would be stuck with a smattering on unrelated bits...I am working on this process on Vivian Underwater, I am almost there...but now I have to go make farfalle col prosciutto...oh, and it's time for my friend, The Marques de Caceres!

Veronica, that crazy girl.  I just loved her the first moment I met her, such a study of contradictions, and all of it written on her skin.  This was the first image of her that I drew, seemed appropriately upside down, falling, and all the while giving this ironic look, falling yet posing, with her tiger like beauty, the mismatched bikini.  I love the distortions in the face, I do realize that they are not the most flattering (though I did make up for that in the next work), just seemed to me to express the strangeness of who she is, suburban rebel, innocent instigator, ladylike bully, agent provokateur...Truly I do not know her at all, she is the friend of the daughter of a friend, and I actually only met her a couple of times, so ALL of these are projections, pure conjecture on my part, but sometimes looking, looking, looking  one does catch a glimpse...

Ok, so here is the poetic side, the gentle bubbles raising from her mouth, the glistening hair floating upward, the gaze demurely downcast...yet with one hand she is pushing away from some wall while a bizarre shadow sneaks behing and her head projects a deep shadow on her shoulder... again the skin is feral...will probably explore this image again in oil soon...