Our ideas about art change with the passage of time. Things I thought often take a complete turn around to their opposite . I sometimes think our ideas change as we change as experience changes us. These two portraits of Jake are a case in point. When these were made I didn't think they were our best effort. Pamela my spouse and I paint these portraits simultaneously, long story short it's sort of a way we can make art together and hang how to the productive end of making portraits. It's a sort of crap shoot like the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse where parts of a drawing are done by several people without seeing each other's painting. By the time we finish these paintings and see them together can be as short as week or sometimes quite a bit longer. In this instance Pamela was painting her son Jake ( Jacob) for the first time since she took up portraits several years back. Her results I think were outstanding a strange mix of likeness and narrative. Like the background adds so much to the painting's magical precision. Jake uses this pic as an id on Facebook ( a sure sign the sitter digs the picture of themselves). It's moody, the technique we use is a 2 and a half hours for a sitting then we finish the pictures seperately with often very different approaches . Pamela uses her photographs ( jpgs. in camera, often tiny pictures { or laser prints} she works from taken at the sitting to adjust her painted portraits to what she sees in the photo). So her portraits have a mix of effects between her observations from the live model and her various photographic techniques for correction and modifications. I can' t use photographs very well in my work save when I work directly from them without a model. When I look at photos of the models we have my paintings are often quite distorted very long in the nose. And the color is rather at a high pitch. In this portrait of Jake I really let the color go tell the story. I try to make a painting rather than a portrait or at least make something that has some power as a visual phenomenon. So when we seen our portraits together we get these weird hybrids . Our sensibilities are there for all to see in colors and faces. And in form and experience though Pamela's portraits they carry a psychological edge as she has more interest in a sort of surrealist / collage type picture and her color is a curious mixure and natural and fantastical ( as in this painting).
This pair of portraits is one of the most interesting from last year's production. I didn't think so then but now I do. I'm glad I can still change my mind. Together these portraits create an odd impression which like a single work a sort of throw of the dice. And we all know that once in a while people get lucky and this a a very lucky painting (charmed and alarmed) something like exactly what we hoped for...