Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother

Today, I added my self portrait to the imaginary brother I have been experimenting with for the past few days, based on inspiration from Willem de Kooning (Imaginary Brother – New Ideas, So Simple, and Yet…, Imaginary Hug, with Feeling. Tri-Cyclopean Portrait). I think I was spoiled by using oil paints on my last portrait. […]

Imaginary Hug, with Feeling

Yesterday’s post was an edited photograph of Dave (my younger brother) and me standing outside Mike’s building at Willowbrook. (For those of you just joining me, Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal.) I’m hugging Dave. I replaced my head with Mike’s, from another family photograph, and Dave’s with mine. […]

Shading and Evading

Over a period of about 10 years or so, I must have taken 300 rolls of film of my brother Mike. I combined these photos with old family snapshots, my journal entries and information garnered from my parents, to create a photographic memoir. It is a safe bet to say Mike didn’t know that I […]

Autism and Cave Paintings

One of the more fascinating bits in Eric Kandel’s* book, The Age of Insight was an alternate appreciation of the people who drew the cave drawings in the Chauvet caves, estimated to be about 30,000 years old.  Art historians, including Ernst Gombrich noted that the realistic representation of horses in these caves implied that the humans who […]

Dividing Shadow

I’ve been working from and old family photograph of my mother and older brother, Mike*, taken in the late 1950s when our parents took us on a camping trip (see Portrait, Mike and Mom, Abstract Portrait Mike and Mom, Mike – Close Up, Continuing to Abstract).  Yesterday I created the beginning of a watercolor that […]

Degeneration of the Past

I finished Patient H.M. today. I have always been interested in memory and have read some of what has been written about this famous patient whose profound memory loss (induced almost certainly) by a bilateral resection of his medial temporal lobes. There was much personal and political intrigue and an appalling sense of the lack […]

Reason for Road Trip

For the past couple of days (see View and View – Update) I’ve posted photos of views from hotel windows.  Joy and I don’t usually stay in hotels, but we traveled down south to Burbank and points south for a special reason: Our daughter Sarah’s wedding! It was a real Mickey Mouse operation. Everyone had […]

Happy Day

The kids came up to see us. It was a family function. We took photographs on the porch.  I normally don’t paint portraits of people I know, family members especially. Everybody’s a critic and frankly, I’m embarrassed at my dearth of skill in producing a passable likenesses.  However, art is about taking risks so below […]

Wistful

I took the photo below last time I in Burbank. It is a view looking down past my stomach at my grandson William. He is not old enough to be wistful, he just wanted to go outside. I, on the other hand was feeling pangs…

When are Portraits Self Portraits?

The photo below is me as a child, but not one I took. I glommed it from an 8mm film my father must have taken, that was converted to video. Originally, I posted this in Micro Expressions.  I was not sure what my expression meant, but it didn’t seem to be a happy one. I wonder […]