Finishing the hat
How you have to finish the hat
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat

This is from Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and is one of my favorite songs of all time. The song, sung by Georges Seurat, perfectly captures those moments of obsession that come over artists when they are working on their art and nothing else matters. I used to have those moments when I was designing and I would look up and hours would have gone by. In law, the only finishing-the-hat moments came when I was writing a brief.

Today was a finishing-the-hat day for me. I had kind of been working on two paintings, one a sort of a portrait that I’d been fiddling with for a week or more, sometimes frustrated, rarely satisfied. Then in the middle I had an a idea for something completely different. Suddenly, today, I just felt like I had to finish them. So I alternated working on them. Here they are:

This portrait is based on a photo I took of Philippe Bronchtein when we went to see him perform at a club in Camden Town. I liked the composition of the photo and because the light wasn’t great, the photo looked like a painting from the beginning. Like my last representational painting of the two guys in the museum, I am not certain that I am done. I think it could be improved (so in a sense I haven’t really finished this hat), but I don’t think I have the technical skills to do much more to it. I’m planning to take an art class (that was one of the things I meant to do today before becoming obsessed), so I may come back to this when I’m feeling more confident in my techniques in acrylics.

The second picture I did pretty fast. It is very loosely based on a couple of paintings I saw at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, one by Picasso and one by someone whose name was Nicholson (I think) and who lived with Barbara Hepson around 1930. I like the way it turned out. It owes a lot to my graphic design background and I probably could have just done it on the computer and printed it out (and in fact, some of my initial playing around with the main idea was done in Adobe Illustrator). I’m not sure the color is right in this photo. That part that looks gray (at least on my computer), is actually a light blue. But you get the idea.

I’m not sure what comes next. Maybe I’ll take a few days off.