A New Portrait: After going to the Royal Academy and seeing the David Hockney exhibit, “82 Portraits and a Still Life”, I decided that I was going to try to do a series of portraits and to have two paintings going at a time, one a portrait and the other a landscape. (Hockney is said to have quipped that the are really only three kinds of paintings: portraits, landscapes and still lives.) I’ve discovered that it’s hard to do portraits. I guess this isn’t a really great insight, but I thought after my first attempt (a portrait of Judie that wasn’t a bad painting, but didn’t really look like her), I might have learned something that would make the second attempt better.

For the second one, I decided to try a portrait of my friend and former roommate, Chris, based on a good photo of him from our trip to France in June. One of the first things I learned is that it is tricky painting someone with a beard. I even went back to the Hockney exhibit to see how he did it. He didn’t really. Only one of the 82 was not clean-shaven. So that wasn’t all that helpful, but, upon close inspection, I did note how the area under the chins of his portraits were always extra dark, so I tried to incorporate that. The other thing Hockney does that is really kind of magical is to add bright or unusual splotches of colors to the faces that seem like that they can’t work but do. I have no idea how it occurs to him to do that (and I’m not going to try).

I kept at this portrait, pushed along by a deadline in my mind. Chris is coming for a quick visit on Sunday and I decided I should try to finish it before he arrived. The result is below. I actually think it is a pretty good painting and it looks more like Chris than the first one looks like Judie, but it still doesn’t really capture him. Of course, while Hackney’s portraits are great, I don’t really know exactly what his subject actually look like. For all I know, the paintings don’t really look like his subjects (although I kind of doubt it.) So I’ve been thinking that maybe I should try doing portraits of people I don’t know as well (or even don’t know at all). My expectations would probably be different and I might be less disappointed by the results.

When Will the Countdown Begin: For quite a long time, I felt like I was visiting London. And then that changed. Looking back, I’m not sure that I can remember a bright line, where I felt that I actually live here, but I know that it happened. I’ve always known that this time here would be a temporary thing, but the end was sufficiently distant that I didn’t feel like a transient resident. I still don’t, but I can begin to feel that ending. In roughly five months, we will back at our home in Montclair, putting the furniture back in place and trying to restart our lives. I know that it is coming and I occasionally think about the logistics of the move and what I am going to do with myself when I get back. At the same time, I am feeling very present in London here and now and that is a good thing. I have real sense of neighborhood in Shoreditch and Spitalfields and Broadgate, etc. And we both have a strong feeling of commitment to New Unity and its community. I sometimes wonder if I could do more good over the next few years trying to help out with New Unity than in taking some role at UU Montclair. Perhaps that will all change once the countdown to the move begins, which I suspect will be sometime in January. Right now, it is just a faint tug. By then, it will be an increasingly strong pull.

I’m Counting on You, Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Down: I think the following is a sign of something, but I can’t decide what that is. Sir Philip Green is an ostentatiously rich Brit, who is reminiscent of Donald Trump. (According to Wikipedia, he was considered for the Donald role in the UK version of “The Apprentice”.) Unlike Trump, he actually did support a number of charities and in 2007 he was knighted. It gradually emerged that he engaged in all sorts of tax avoidance schemes and conspicuously spent huge amounts of money on himself and his family. He was a Cameron confidante and generally the kind of rich guy lots of people grew to hate. He seemed to buy and sell various retail businesses. His big troubles began after he bought the “High Street” department store chain, BHS. He proceeded to drive it into bankruptcy, not only costing all of the workers their jobs, but also a great chunk of their pensions. It has been an ongoing scandal. Green seems to be perceived as such an awful guy that even lots of Conservatives  hate him and they normally have never met a rich guy they won’t toady up to.

This week, the House of Commons held a hearing about taking his knighthood back. It seemed a bit weird to me that you could do that. I’d think that everyone getting a knighthood assumes that it is lifetime, irrevocable honor. Think again, Elton John and Paul McCartney! The humorous thing about the whole thing is that, while the MPs got to make endless outraged speeches, it turns out that the House of Commons has no power to revoke a knighthood, so it is just a meaningless recommendation to whoever actually does have the power. Is this an act of faux populism? An easy way to fake concern for the little guy, while systematically shredding the NHS and the safety net? Is it some sort of weird Brexit response?