Gallery of Past Art: Herself Myself

Today's piece is Herself Myself

I've always experienced a sense of duality within myself. Its a study of masks and how we portray ourselves in the world and what is true within ourselves. Needless to say I believe identity is and should be an ongoing pursuit for all people. In many ways my writing confronts this on another level. However before my pen became mature enough to relate this, my art always seemed to encapsulate what I needed to express.

Herself Myself was started as a rough pencil sketch that I then fleshed out with chalk pastels. 

In this self portrait both women are me. This is the face I show the world, brash foreword facing exposed and unapologetic in the stance.

The other is the hidden me who is afraid vulnerable hiding behind the other and sorry for even existing, always striving for perfection knowing its utter impossible and unattainable nature.

Confessions of the Unrequited

As intelligent human beings we sometimes have a tendency to ignore basic fundamental truths about life.   One being our instincts and how accurate they are most of the time.  In my opinion, as we have become more and more 'civilized' we have figured out how to ignore our animal natures for the sake of logic.  I particularly have a tendency to ignore all that defies logic.

Love has and always will defy logic.  Why would I, how could I fall in love in a moment without a thought other than this.  I am in love.  Frozen and in shock completely unbidden. I never asked for this part. For so long I've been aware of your existence and never noticed anything about it. One moment, one chance meeting and I see nothing else. I feel like I'm insane.  I am an intelligent, rational, pragmatic creature that only on occasion commits to flights of fancy and fantasy driven rhetoric.  And when I do, I'm careful to keep it contained.  But this overwhelms me and I can't hold it in not one second longer.

What are the rules of engagement when it comes to declaring impossible, unrequited fairytale love?  In person, by love letter, over a near death experience.  All can either take the path of enlightenment or fall short to suffer the slow pangs of death by the mundane rudimentary nature of our normal existences.  But I was never a stickler for normalcy. Normalcy feels like art without passion. Just an empty shell of what could be. I'm rambling and stalling.

I hope this is taken with the utmost suspension of disbelief.  Because I don't believe I have ever been so painfully honest as I am being right now for you.

I don't know you, yet what I feel . . . I am in love with you and I know as surely as the sun will rise in the morning and set the following night that I will love whoever I find you to be. 

When you tell others of this foolish strange wordy woman throwing herself at you shamelessly, please feel flattered.  I beg of you to speak kindly of someone who has never conducted herself like this before and try not to make it into too big of a joke at my expense.  I may be insane but I stopped believing in fairytales a long time ago so I expect nothing more than the knowledge that I was honest enough to tell you.

Gallery of Past Art: Enchantress

I've been called a bit of a Renaissance woman. I've dabbled in as much art as humanly possible.  The art I feel most compelled to create however is writing. But I'm not immune to my first art which was drawing and painting. Over the course of the next few weeks I'm going to share some of my favorite pieces:

Enchantress

Enchantress was drawn with ebony pencil and colored pencil. I only wanted brief bits of color to highlight the mostly black and white space.

The hardest thing to capture was this look on her face. I needed it to be focused and drawing low lidded eyes was my biggest challenge.

I took extra time and effort to try and get the shadowing just right. The play of light on her face, neck to try and reveal the tendons and plans created by human anatomy.

Although it can't be seen in the photograph when this work was hung at my Senior show it was placed under an angled light so the sparkle of glitter I placed at  the lit points was visible.