Unfamiliar Faces

The above is a recent notebook sketch, from a photo gathered somewhere on the internet a long while ago and saved in my computer; I have no idea who this is, but I do love his eyes.  I get asked why I don't paint people I know, and I sometimes do, but frequently I just want a face to begin with, a reference from which I accept the challenge of quickly finding a likeness, a way of exercising my paint-mixing and application.  Often I paint these portraits between sets on the weights in my little exercise room.  It is a balancing act, because if I get caught up in the painting and spend too much time on it, I lose the benefit of the workout, but if I speed too quickly through the motions of painting, I end up with a mess.  Sometimes a mess is okay, as in the one below, where I was interested in the effects of aging.

It's obvious that I took less time and care with this one, but that is not always the point.  Time, as seemingly endless as all the sands in the world, seems to slip through our fingers just as easily, and I find that I can guard it jealously and also waste it like a brute.  Time leaves its mark on us all, steals from us, gives us everything we have, and yet we simply cannot ever understand it fully: does it form a loop, is it an endless line, can we ever travel back and forth on it?  We seem destined to remain ever ignorant, left with a sense of loss at the end.

Here is One Art, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 
so many things seem filled with the intent 
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 
next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 
the art of losing’s not too hard to master 
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

On A Dark Pond 12x16 oil

And finally, a recent plein air from along the banks of the Tualatin River.