I’ve taken countless photographs of hands over the years. Many of them have been of my family. I caught some of my older brother Mike‘s* gestures on film; my younger brother Dave‘s hands on the piano; my father conducting imaginary orchestras and my mother holding Mike when he was young. These images are a treasure […]
Some times a single image is not enough. During the past few days I have been focused on distilling an image into its visual essence. My goal was to convey the significance of the image with just the right amount of detail, no more, no less. Today’s experiment is a bit different. I unearthed a roll of […]
In keeping with the process I’ve been using in my last series that began with a photo of my brother Mike*, beginning with Portrait, Mike and Mom, ending with Autism and Cave Paintings. In yesterday’s post (Emotional), I revisited a seminal photo in my long term photo project about him. Today I tried to boil […]
I intended to focus on painting a representation of Mike’s* eye from a childhood photograph of one our camping trips. However, his eye doesn’t tell the whole story. I thought maybe the combination of his eye and mouth would be adequate. Here is a preliminary sketch, and here is the watercolor study. Mike’s face is distorted in […]
I’m still investigating the photograph my Dad took of Mike and my Mom. I estimate the date of the photo as circa 1958. Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. We used to go camping. Mike was a handful, I don’t know how my parents took us all (Mike, Dave, my […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Until I get more familiar with some of the schools of abstract art (i.e., Abstract Expressionism, Kitchen Sink Art, Organic Abstraction, etc.) I’m going to rely on my own ideas to seed my abstract studies. Today is the third in a series of abstractions that had its origin as a photograph. This […]
The finger that clicks my camera shutter always gets itchy when I see light falling a certain way on an object. A week or so ago, the Crispy Leaves caught its attention; the other day the Crispier Leaf caused me to snap. It looked so simple sitting there. It could have been a sea shell that I stopped to inspect. This […]
Thoughts about abstraction Yesterday I painted a study of hands that were doing a specific job: taking a fish and preparing it to be eaten. I’ve been thinking of how I would go about abstracting the image of these working hands. Working from my image, I could try to convey some of the following ideas: preparing […]
I started my search through photographs I had taken of my older brother to look for emotional content that I could try to capture in my painting. My older brother is autistic, low functioning and is nonverbal. Every now and then, my whole family, younger brother D, my parents and I, used to visit Mike […]
I am still interested in creating an atlas of hand gestures as related to my older brother and me. If you are visiting my blog for the first time, my older brother is autistic, very low functioning and has never spoken. Images of hands have figured noticeably in my photographs of him. Using a short […]
