Here is the progression of my latest painting. This piece is 30x44" gouache on paper.
It's hard to say what this piece is about yet. It's still on my wall, making me think. I typically don't have any lesson I'm trying to get across when I start a piece, but as it develops, it reveals the lessons to me.
At the moment this feels like the inside and the outside. Mind and body. After finishing this piece today, I had sentences in my head like, "My lovely puckered skin. My supple wrinkled flesh- porcelain milky splotchy. Lovely little sores." I read some poem on the subway about a woman describing herself as an orchid, and I couldn't stop trying to imagine what the writer actually looked like. I imagined an overweight, older woman with moles and splotches and cellulite. Vericose veins. I think our bodies are beautiful in all of their disgusting detail. It's amazing that we work at all. Beautiful flesh puppets. Anyway, this just continues to amaze me all the time.