Young Woman (1983)

Today is the first day of 2007. January 1 is one of a number of days that celebrate a new year. 

This young woman might be witnessing the first light of a new year. December 8 will be the New Year's Day for this blog. It is nearly a month since I began blogging. In the first week of February, I will be showing a series of watercolor and gouache paintings that I did beginning in 1987, which was the year my eating disorder recovery began. Those paintings are called "The Calendar Series" and were pivotal in my healing. 

The drawings and paintings we have looked at so far came from a part of me that thrived despite an eating disorder that had plagued me throughout most of my life prior to 1987.

Life Drawing of a Young Woman (1982)

In 1971, I was given a box of Rembrandt pastels which I never used because I didn't know how to use them. In 1982, I brought them to a drawing class at Western Washington University and surprised myself by doing this drawing which was one of five pastel drawings done in a life drawing class setting. The drawing professor, R. Allen Jensen, asked me if I had seen the work of R.B. Kitaj or Francis Bacon. I hadn't, but I went to the university library to search for the work of those artists and understood why he had asked that question. The artists, Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe, both of whom worked in pastel, had influenced me, along with Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Arshille Gorky, Wassily Kandinsky, The Blue Rider group and Bob Dylan's music.