Portraits

This is a potrait I painted of Kaveh, who I mentioned on a previous art page on my website. A very wonderful teacher! A year or so after taking his class, I wrote a creative non-fiction story about learning art from him. If you are interested in reading it, click on this link: Shadow Learning I know what Kaveh would say to me of this painting, if he were to view it: "The hands are all wrong!" I would have to agree. They are too small and awkwardly drawn. He used to say to me that you have to look at hands and feet as just another object, to draw them right, and then to draw them bigger than what they seem. I still keep trying to improve on the hands and feet when drawing people, but I'm still failing miserably. However, I'm happy with this painting, despite the bad hands, because I feel it captures Kaveh's internal contemplative self. MEDIA: Watercolor

Left: A painting of my son, Beau, probably when he was sixteen or so? I guess it doesn't look like him much, but I still like it, it captures something of his self, in my mind. I painted it from memory, of seeing him sitting reading a book one time. MEDIA: acrylic on masonite Right: Randy, Normy, and TV remote control, in no particular order. I love this painting, although I don't have it anymore. I tossed it in the trash bin with a lot of other paintings that I had no room to store. MEDIA: acrylic on canvas board

I feel, of all the portraits I've done, that this one of Jeremy is the best, as far as capturing both an external and internal likeness of a person I once knew. I drew this from a photo, but I only used the photo for a reference, since the photo didn't really capture Jeremy's personality and his bright smile, the way I saw it. Jeremy was on Beau's Little League team in Coon Rapids, and such a fun and nice kid, and man, could he run the bases. He later moved into the inner city, got into drugs, and who knows what his life is like now. Randy gave this painting to him when he stopped by one day to visit, as a teenager, before he got into the big drug thing and started screwing up his life. I have no clue if Jeremy still has this painting, and if he is still screwing up his life on drugs. I would like to think he still has the painting, as a reminder of his fun days and those who cared about him, and that he has gotten off drugs, and is living a happy life. I guess I'll never know. MEDIA: Pastel

The above is a series of Ogar Ogut, from Sudan, a fellow classmate during my ARRC days. One day, I decided he would make a nice subject for a painting, someone to paint on my own outside of my class assignments. So, I asked him if he would model for me, let me take some photo shoots. I wanted to capture something of his native home village setting, so we went to the brush along the Mississipi River behind ARRC, and I asked him to take off his clothes above the waist, to capture that in a way. I took another photo of him fully-clothed, the painting second from left. The other three came from the second photo, my using my imagination to capture all the sides of Ogar, as I saw him. I prefer not to work from photographs as a resource, but sometimes they are great starting places to let my imagination run. I showed these paintings to Ogar, and he liked the first one the best, and I assume that is because it is the most realistic likeness of him, from his viewpoint.

MEDIA: First one is watercolor, the middle four are pastel, the last one is charcoal.

Have you ever gone to a bar with a sketchpad, and observed the people around you by drawing them? This is where this portrait came from. One great thing about sketching in bars, everyone is usually too drunk or absorbed in other things to notice that you are sketching them, so they have a natural pose, versus an unnatural posed-pose. I was sitting in a booth with my husband, in a bar in Coon Rapids, sketching one night, and I noticed this woman sitting at the bar across the room, with a drink in her hand, not smiling, and all these guys behind her seemingly trying to flirt with her. She paid little attention to them, and from the expression on her face, I have a feeling she found it rather annoying. So, I roughly sketched that scene and later painted it, from my sketches and memory. I don't like the colors I used, but I do feel I captured the emotions of her moment. MEDIA: acrylic on canvas

Left: Me Right: Sugato I grouped these two together because they both have Bengali phrases on them, written in Bengali script. Unfortunately, my Bengali has become rusty, so I can't remember what I wrote except that they are both metaphors, the phrase on the left a metaphor for a rose, on the right, a metaphor for a sailor. MEDIA: acrylic on canvas

Left: Meatloaf I guess you could call this a portrait of a song. This painting is unfinished, but my intent was to paint Meatloaf with a depiction of his song Objects In The Rearview Mirror in the background. I greatly admire Meatloaf as a musician, songwriter, performer, and intellectual. Left: Beau This is a painting of my son Beau when he was around twelve years old. I caught him napping and thought it would make a nice painting. Media: Watercolor

I painted these during the OJ Simpson trial, and what I was trying to depict was the obscenity of it all. On the top left, the judge is so bored that he is playing cats cradle, and the notice posted top right lists alternate jurors, which of course were countless during this very long, drawn-out trial. The painting on the left is a preliminary sketch for the painting on the right. Media: Watercolor

I never finished the picture on the left, not even sure I still have the original. This is a pastel drawing I started a while back of another favorite art teacher of mine, Laura Migliorino. I definitely had some focus on what I wanted to portray with this painting, when I started it, and I still recall what I wanted to capture. But I just couldn't seem to capture it, so I gave up. The painting on the right is a pencil sketch of Laura. Laura ranks right up there with Kaveh, as an art teacher, in teaching me what art is all about, and also in her recognizing my style in art, and encouraging me to expand on that. What a great teacher. MEDIA: pastel on paper

Left: This is Veena, another one of my favorite teachers (Hamlne University). I had her for African-American Lit, for my English senior seminar class on Salman Rushdie, and for my independent study on Rabindranath Tagore. I have many fond memories of her, both in and out of class. I especially enjoyed the day we spent together at her house watching the 6-hour long PBS television presentation of Mahabharata. As with my painting of Kaveh, I feel I've also captured Veena's internal contemplative self in this portrait. MEDIA: acrylic on canvas Right: A Portrait of My Brother In Fondest Memory of Jimmy. July 5, 1947 to December 18, 1982 MEDIA: oil on canvas

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