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In 1984, I was 34 years old, conscious that I was nearing the middle of my life assuming I lived to old age, and painfully aware that I didn't like the direction my personal life had taken.
The image may be seen as what C. G Jung called an animus. In the process of taking myself seriously as an artist, I had begun moving out of a dark sense of myself to a place of acceptance of both my shadow and light. I was also thinking about a man my age whom I had known since I was 17 and trying to picture him moving with me into a dynamically balanced life.
What appears to be black in this watercolor and gouache painting is what is known as Payne's Gray, a versatile color in the watercolor palette.
Almost a year after September 11, I painted the two above images in Payne's Gray, closely followed by the image of Nooksack Falls painted from memory. I didn't paint again until sometime in 2003 after my father died of congestive heart failure on St. Patrick's Day of that year.
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