SUNFLOWERS

This week’s portrait is Laureen M.

It's funny how life and friendships evolve. I met Laureen as a result of someone else, who is now long gone out of my life. There's some sadness there but I strongly believe people do come in and out of your life for a reason. So even though that other person is gone I did learn a lot from them.

With Laureen I think I am still learning and growing, and what makes this even more exciting is that we don't even live in the same country. She's over nine thousand miles away in Africa.

Over the years there have been moments when the song “Sunflowers” by Everclear would be playing and she came to mind. Don't know why, but this time around I thought it'd be interesting to do a portrait of her using colors of a Sunflower. The end result has a strange mysterious look to it which wasn't intentional.

Laureen is one of the few people I could imagine doing hundreds of studies and art pieces on,  Jennifer Fabos Patton is another. They have a chameleon like nature about them that’s unique, an ability to become different characters depending on how they’re dressed. The only other person I've seen this in to date was a guy named David Bowie.

Inspiration for my work continues to come from everywhere, even thousands of mile away!

WHAT'S UP DOC?

This week’s portrait subjects are Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny!

This week, I just wanted to do an image of someone that made me laugh and had happy memories associated with it.

I love those early Looney Tunes cartoons, hands down they were the best animated cartoons during their time. As a kid the humor was direct and easy to follow, but then later as an adult, the appreciation increased as you started to understand some of the inside jokes that were targeted to an older crowd.

Lola Bunny I guess was the studio effort to bring sexual diversity among the characters and a merchandising gimmick for the movie, ”Space Jam”. I don't know if she had as much of an impact as Bugs, given I had moved on to other animated series and characters around the time of her arrival.

Lately life has been feeling like a Looney Tunes episode. Like someone broke into the Acme factory, let loose every crazy imaginable device in it, from the paint that can created tunnels when applied on walls to exploding flowers.

There's a certain sense of humor to it all as you watch and listen. But if you're an adult you see, and understand the inside jokes, might make a different association and cringe instead of laughing.

Perfect examples, you hear character names like, “Bosko”, “Speedy Gonzales” or “Mad Dog Mattis”.

Are you laughing yet?...
 
That’s All Folks!

YOU'RE SAD, WHO YOU'RE GONNA' CALL?

This week’s portrait is Leslie Jones!

I wanted to draw someone who represented strength, positivity, and love in my mind. Strength in handling the crazies that attacked her over a movie role. Positivity, as they went low, she didn't go there with them. And the love and compassion she seems to have towards people.

“I take care of everybody. I'm either hugging you or making sure that you're not sick, because my backpack has every kind of medicine in it.” - Leslie Jones

I think as of this writing I might own close to 3000 pens! Different brands, different sizes, and different colors. I’ve found that colors across many of the brands are very similar and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are all manufactured by one company in Taiwan or China.

What is missing among all these pens are earth tones. I really wish someone would make a collection of pens colors that are as varied as a box of Crayola crayons, and NO GLITTER!

Still with the color limitations, I think I did a good job with rendering her image. I had fun with the hair, throwing in other colors.

I hope we see a lot more from Leslie this year. She seems like a good person, a fun person, and she knows how to make people laugh and feel good. Given what the next few years might look like, we probably should clone her.

CHANGES

This week's portrait is of iconic, legendary, super star, one of my favorite music artist, David Bowie.

Can you believe tomorrow, January 10th, will make it one year since he died!

My very first Bowie albums were, “Changes” and “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders a From Mars”.

I still have my actually albums too. Am glad I never got on board with the idea of trashing LPs for mp3s. There was that one time though, I was attempting to convert my albums into MP3 files, and the Recliner of Rage was born.

The gold colored ink gives it an art nouveau/ deco look. I thought I did a pretty good likeness of him but then someone I knew said she didn't know who it was suppose to be and also claimed not to really know much about his music. The second half of that sounded scary to me. Bowie in my mind is one or was one of the biggest performer in my time so far. The idea that a generation behind me has already forgotten him or doesn't really know much about who he was is really hard to imagine.

That's life I guess. You are only important in the moment and this illusion we call time, will always forget you in the future.

“I don't know where I'm going from here but I promise it won't be boring.” - David Bowie

WE ALL LIVE IN A YELLOW SUBMARINE

This week's portrait, the Yellow Submarine.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, the Yellow Submarine was or is a person, or persons, as far as I am concerned.

I can't remember if it was a toy in a cereal box or a graphic from a candy wrapper in which I first saw the submarine. What I do remember is that it looked cool and something about its design felt good. I remember drawing it too, I should search around since a hand full of my childhood drawings still exist.

Growing up I had no clue who the Beatles were. Then again, I had no clue about a lot of things (I think am still very clueless on a lot of thing but I am learning and updating).

In high school I had a friend and fellow student who was a huge Beatles fan, even had his own band, but I never really made the connection then either. It wasn't until college during those visits to the NYU music library that I finally began to make the connection, "The Beatles Yellow Submarine" album. (Thank you Yvette for indirectly introducing me to this world of music by having me wait for you in that Library while you were in class).
 
Other than just loving the look of the submarine, I decided to use the holes, referred to in the movie, as graphic elements for the meme background, but in this case symbolizing the multiverse. The submarine represents it self as well as us.

In one of those holes lies a place where the music is still playing.

I hope we someday find it.

Happy New Year!