Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In / Early Morning Reflection

It was still fairly dark outside. I was in my kitchen and noticed something moving to my right. It was my reflection in the window.

If

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams
Everybody sees their self walkin' around with no one else
Half the people can be part right all of the time and

Some of the people can be all right part of the time but
All the people can't be all alright all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours", I said that

-- Bob Dylan (lyrics from "Talking World War III Blues")





"Good luck to ya"




Update:  Blue Moon

Calendar Series: 62nd Month / Self-Portrait with Brothers of Mercy and Night Falling from the Sky (1990)

Sometime between 1987 and 1990, I went alone to Cannon Beach and stayed for a few days in a cottage on the far south end. In the evening, while I was sitting on the bluff watching the ocean, one of the owners of the cottage took my picture without my knowledge. A few weeks later, he sent a copy of the photo he had taken of me. That is what I used as a starting point for this painting. The second image shows how this painting may have looked if I hadn't decided to change the stormy sky to a night sky and then walked out of the room and returned to find that the Payne's Gray from the sky had dripped in a straight black line across part of the painting. At first I was distressed, but then I decided to "use" the accident and call it "night falling from the sky" after a haunting song by Bob Dylan. Paintings have a "life of their own." The painting I wanted to paint didn't happen, but another one took shape due to something beyond my control. Over the years when I have shown photo reproductions to people who say they would like to see what kind of art work I do, this painting is often chosen as a favorite. My mother liked it so much that she bought it, declining my offer to give it to her as a gift. She told me that when my Uncle Cyrus saw it he said, "Your daughter is a philosopher." After my mother died in 1994 and my father sold their retirement cottage overlooking the ocean in Gualala, California, my father chose to hang it in his retirement apartment in Bellingham, Washington. It now hangs near my front door and continues to draw attention.

Self Portrait of an Old Friend as a Young Man (1982)

This young man was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1969, went to Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic in January of 1970 and returned on December 8, 1970. Each day he was in Vietnam he wrote a letter to me, sometimes including drawings and photographs. Each day he was gone, I wrote a letter to him. In this drawing from a photograph he sent to me, I portrayed him as a man who could carry the weight of darkness and light in impossible situations. In Jungian terms, he is my animus.

Unlike the previous chalk pastel life drawings in this series, this one was done by projecting a slide onto a piece of drawing paper and tracing the image. Using that technique to produce a image was a drawing class assignment. I thought of the technique as "cheating." I can't take credit for either the drawing or the photograph from which the drawing was done, only for reproducing an image from 1970 from the war in Vietnam.

It's Christmas Eve in this season of holidays, holy days.