Portraits V

This one is from 1998, but I wasn't able to display it in my online galleries until recently because the anti-nudity regulations at my previous website host were so ridiculous. (Give me a break—this is an outdoor statue which other societies have been letting small children walk past for milennia.) Please thank David Bowie for providing me with my current very open-minded web host. I wish I could tell you what all I did to create this, but it's been so long that all I really remember now is that it started out (like so many of my pictures do) as a black and white photograph. Oh, and click the picture if you want to see a larger version..

Look, it's real flesh this time! This is a photograph of Iman, Somalian supermodel and wife of my ISP. In the original photograph, she was standing against a plain white sheet with just a plain grey shadow behind her. The current background is my contribution. Click the picture to see a larger version. (Go on, you know you want to.)

This next one on the left is a portrait of David Bowie which I created back in 1998, during a terribly depressing nine-month time period in which I had graduated from college but had not found a job yet, and was therefore stuck with my parents still and had to listen to them asking me every day when I was going to find a job. We had no internet access at home (though I'd had it through college) which is why I had to draw this picture from scratch instead of getting a photograph off the web. Also, the BowieNet ISP launched on September 1, 1998, and I desperately wanted to belong to it but I had resolved to force myself to go without internet access until I could get a job and move out and buy internet access at my own residence. I'd hoped to have a job before the ISP launched, but when I failed to acquire one, I punished myself by denying myself internet access and sat around drawing pictures of him and wishing desperately that I were living anywhere in the world but with my parents in an internet-less household. In retrospect I think I should probably have been kinder to myself and allowed myself BowieNet access. It was not as though I really needed any further punishing; I was quite miserable enough already, and having BowieNet access might have helped. Then again, if someone had simply offered me a job within a more reasonable time period, that would have helped a whole lot more.

This picture on the left took me a long, long time. A while back I designed a collection of seven rainbows, ranging from light to dark, each carefully measured out so that the color shifts remain perfectly steady, both within each rainbow and from one rainbow to the next. I've been stretching these rainbows into various shapes and feeding them into everything from Windows wallpaper and screensavers to the background of this web page. I decided to use them all in this picture—the background of the picture is, in fact, the same rainbow as the background of this web page, just not stretched so wide. It looked easy: I just had to white out the areas of my drawing to be filled with a particular rainbow and then paste that rainbow into the whitened areas, repeating the process for each rainbow. Unfortunately, it was difficult to judge which rainbow I wanted where until I'd pasted them all in, and then I had to white them all out by hand again. It did turn out well, though. I'm glad I left the irises and the mouth in their original colors. Everything else in the picture is a rainbow, even the parts that are so dark or light that they look look black or white, like the eyebrows, the pupils of the eyes, and the highlights in the pupils.

I hadn't decided who it was when I was drawing it, but now that I've finished, the dark sculpted eyebrows and the set of the mouth firmly convince me it's Rita Mae Brown.

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