Hopefully my wife will forgive me for posting this image, since it is not an especially flattering portrait of her.

Obviously, beauty was not the main object in this little experiment in gouache and ink. My avenue of exploration for the foreseeable future is the line that divides abstraction and realism and the way that those two elements deal with the surface of a canvas in very different ways. I’m trying to find a place where images can be interpreted visually in several ways, or where different parts of the canvas speak to different elements and qualities of the subject. Chuck Close plays with this aspect in some ways, and so does Jenny Saville, although her efforts are more along the lines of Lucien Freud, trying to literally make flesh from paint on the canvas. This piece is a baby step in my own interpretation of that direction.