The moment I had this project on the drawing board I began to regret it.  It was done from a photo that Marsha and I took of ourselves in a furniture sales room to show a friend who had been talking to us about that very furniture line the day before.  Basically, it had been a throw away photo.  Something about the way I am looking at the viewer eventually made me stop and think - “Hey, that’s kind of me.”  That’s all it was - just the stare.  It was meant to be a quick thing I would do between more ambitious projects; but soon I discovered that It would be more complicated.

 

I hadn’t bothered to have a closer look at the values of the photo. Yes, the hair had some darkness.  But everything else - even the lips -were camouflaged in a swamp of narrow mid values.  Perhaps, this was why I liked it.  The faces of Archie Comics’ Betty and Veronica, similarly, have only mid value.  Their faces are  just a nose and some big eyes.  The wrinkles, the scar, the 5 O’Clock shadow… Flat value hides all that. Crap.  I realized that I had chosen what amounted to a caricature to use as the basis for a self portrait.  That hadn’t really been the point. 

 

But what had been the point? I guess I hadn’t really thought it through.  So I had to address it on the fly on the drawing board.  I decided to pull out even the slightest hints of highlight and push them brighter.  I did the same with some of the darker mid ranges.  And I created multiple mid range ink blends (I mix the commercial products in ways that the manufacturer doesn’t really recommend.)  The result was that I created a kind of Dorian Gray.  The wrinkles are more intense.  The overlapping of the various ink shades also created thicker ropes of lines (think elevation marks on a contour map). The hard set of the mouth is more exaggerated. Overall it made the final look so much more weary and care worn.  Marsha was aghast and told me that I don’t look that old.  Kind of her to say; but I guess one starts to feel that way after confronting the broke down palace staring back from the bathroom mirror again and again. Overall, despite some grotesqueries created by the heightened contrast, I was satisfied that it was sufficiently “me” to call it a portrait.  

 

Then again, one doesn’t always see one’s self, does one?