New Self Portrait

Update: 

I also started this painting today while watching Planet Earth on BBC America in anticipation of Blue Planet II premiering tonight at 9:00 pm. 

I’m using oil paints on canvas, and I’ve discovered that I can’t look at something and paint it. I can look at something and draw it, but painting is a whole different thing, according to my brain. So I paint from memory. I remembered seeing a horse drawn in charcoal online and think I even posted it on an old blog post, so I tried to think about that horse and then just painted it how I remembered it. 

I also don’t draw an outline on the canvas beforehand, but instead just start painting from the picture I see in my mind. 

My original plan was to make the horse very abstract, but that isn’t how it’s turned out so far. I think I’m going to change it, though, and add a lot more white, as if the horse is half hidden in a snowstorm. I’m not sure I can accomplish that, but I think I’ll try. This painting took me about 30 minutes I guess to get this far. I started with a background of white mixed with a little gray, and then a little blue. 

Right now I don’t see how any of my art can escape at least some blue. I just LOVE blue...

I re-painted my self-portrait today, and I like this one better.  It’s more ...fierce...lol

Anyway, you all might laugh at my artistic attempts, but I don’t care. I’m really enjoying it, even though I get paint all over myself and everything around me. All artists have to start somewhere, and I don’t want to be taught, but to teach myself. 

I’m a very introspective person; contrary to popular belief, I don’t talk much at all. I can write pretty good, when I want to, but my deepest thoughts are agoraphobic. They don’t seem to want to come outside of my head, unless it’s on their terms. 

Often, it’s because I can’t find the words to express some of the things that affect me deeply. 

Other times, inspiration decides to pay a visit and invites the deeper thoughts outside to play, and that’s when I express myself the best. 

I’m happiest like that. There’s a certain contentment that comes with being alone with just those thoughts that make me catch my breath even in the relative silence of a moonlit night. 

Wondering about stuff is one of the most amazing things. Like how a giant school of fish can move so swiftly in unison, almost like they’re one organism. Or how a pride of lionesses work together to bring down an adult giraffe. Or how it can be that only one species of butterfly is the only living thing that can produce its own blue pigment (and even that butterfly is coming under nano-scrutiny, and may not actually produce its own blue pigment). Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to blue—it’s so rare in nature, yet so very much the color of life.