Today’s watercolor is a bit different from those of the past few days, during which I concentrated on created an imaginary portrait of my brother Mike (Mike is my older brother, who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal.) (See Imaginary Brother – New Ideas, So Simple, and Yet…, Imaginary Hug, with Feeling, Tri-Clopean Portrait, and Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother). I was influenced greatly by a sketch by Willem de Kooning.

I prepared a sheet of watercolor paper by rinsing it under the faucet, crumbling it into a ball, unfurling it and pressing it flat to dry.

At a glance, the paper looks flat, so I scraped a piece of charcoal across the top of it to bring out the folds.  Then I continued to paint.

At the lower right quadrant of this study, I saw a pattern that reminded me of my brother Mike’s lips: those of his young self and, simultaneously his lips as an old man. I enhanced it to match Mike’s eye, which you can see above and to the left.

I love the ambiguity of this one.