Hey, I thought I was painting one face and as it turns out there’s more than one. When I brought the painting home from the framers seeing it from a new perspective allowed me to see the second face on my right hand side (the person’s left) as a profile.
Then much later, many years, I saw another face, on that same side between the frontal version and the profile version on the right side (my right looking at it).
Then later than that while lying on the bed where I could see it in the mirror, full frontal view, I saw another profile on the left hand side (my left and the person’s right) with the hair going down the side now acting like a blonde beard.
So I see three views looking at it in the mirror and three views looking at it straight on absent the mirror. The main character has two eyes looking straight ahead; that’s what I was painting, one head, one face, one view, whether looking at it in the mirror or not. So the total views wouldn’t be six, it would be five.
There are possibly more views that resemble gradations, which I’m not counting.
But that just goes to show you that regardless of the intent of the artist or author of a piece of written work, the viewer(s) can and will intrepret it differently.
Obviously I didn’t mean to put all those views in one painting, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed them after the fact, and found the others by accident when looking at it in the mirror, not as an inspection, but casually.
I recall painting it on the floor in the living room, using indoor house paints – on the carpet actually with newspapers. The room was dark except for a spray of dim light coming from the pantry off the kitchen aways away. I wasn’t focusing on anything; I just felt like painting in the dark out of the view of nosy neighbors.
The first picture from left to right is the frontal view – no mirror. The profile face/head can be seen on your right looking at it. There’s two of them actually, plus the one view looking straight forward – the two profile views on the right hand side show only one eye each, one per view, so you’ve got three eyes there, including the eye on the left. There is a fourth view with both eyes on the right, where the mole is, merging into one eye to create a larger profile.
The second picture to the right of the actual painting is the miror view. I know, my iphone is taking horrible pictures – probably because the holidays are coming up and Apple wants everybody in the world to buy a new phone; they shouldn’t be allowed to mess with the quality of anything on a purchased phone or the speed of computers either, which they admitted to doing years ago, and it seems they’re back to their old manipulative tricks.
Anyway, on your left looking at the mirror view, you see the profile that was initially on your right when looking at the non-mirror view. You can locate them better if you use that mole on the side of the face as your guide. So you’ve got that view, but looking to the opposite side, now on the right, your right, you’ll see a totally new profile where what use to be the head hair hanging down becomes a blonde beard. I have yet to see that view when looking at the painting without a mirror.
I’m going to try to get a better picture tomorrow.
I thought it was interesting, the whole thing of it.
Hope this mini dissertation wasn’t too painful. The two major profile views look like they’re looking at each other in the mirror view.
I haven’t tried to find any particular meanings for it all, but it is intriguing. Maybe I should look at all my paintings in the mirror and see what’s there. I tend to think nothing at this point. This particular painting will probably stand unique in that quality.
Guess that’s what happens when you let your spirit do the painting. Unexplainable surprises arise.
next day – Okay I’m back. It wasn’t easy geting a better picture taken through the mirror. I had to take it down from the wall, then take a mirror in another room off the wall, set them up opposite each other in the room with the greater light (we have a dark apartment – not my choice), then sit behind the painting with the camera and take the picture like that. It came out better than last night, that’s for sure.
The “Cartoonist”, by the way, has an attitude in the mirror, something it lacks in a frontal view. When we move to a warehouse apartment where I can paint without all the hate surrounding me as is the case at Kirby Manor senior residence turned to public housing, I’ll take pictures of all the paintings in the mirror and see what I find – of course I’ll share it.
In this mirror view painting it looks like the profile on the right is telling the profile on the left a secret in the ear. It’s the two-in-one profile (on the left) being told a secret. The third profile looks to be within the second profile, on the left hand side of the mirrored version. So, layers. I recall years ago somebody saying about Gerry Adams, that he was layered like an onion.
“During the Hunger Strikes of 1981, Adams played an important policy-making role. The hunger strikes saw Sinn Féin become more important as a political force. In 1983 he was elected president of Sinn Féin and became the first Sinn Féin MP elected to the British House of Commons since the 1950s.”
If you look at the middle spot (eye) you can see the two profiles on the right and left more clearly as well as the third profile.
There are actually two profile views on the right – one whispering in the ear of the other profile and one facing the left profile with a bit of a squished downward nose.
Sometimes it gets a little scary. Is that called a trinity? Me, myself and I. And a few shades of others? All our ethnicities.
Maybe I was painting myself as an animal. I rarely go into a painting knowing in advance what I’m going to paint or construct; it’s like writing, I just start paininting or in the case of writing, I just start painting.
I recall at Smith College when taking an art course we were instructed to do a self-portrait. I didn’t have a clue as to how. So I didn’t. The art teacher didn’t mark me down for it and never mentioned it. One of my pieces was put on display for some event along with others. A big plant up close from the arboretum. She was impressed with a couple drawings I did, but complained that I should have put them on better paper. I bought the paper she told us to buy. If I had put them on better paper, she might have complained that I was trying to upstage the others, or that I couldn’t follow instructions.
Out of all the works, in two instances I knew in advance what I wanted to paint: a pink rose in the sky and a swan. The rose turned out to be ‘cow going to slaughter’ and the swan turned out to be ‘donkey passing’. I painted donkey the night after Midnight Rose, our dog daughter, died and haven’t painted since. She was with me for all my painting except the cow and donkey. Sea animals was done simultaneously with what was supposed to be a swan. I’m not sure if that painting still exists or where it is.
Here’s some other views I took yesterday before taking the painting and mirror down, where you can see the profile on the left side of the painting, that I’ve yet to see absent the mirror.
Hope all of this wasn’t too confusing.
BIRTH OF A SEED™© 