Four Faces and More

Those of you who were at the recent Schrag Reunion saw an interim version of this image. The title reflects my ambiguity about the image. The actual Four Faces really took far less time to complete than the more complex design elements that surround them. Here is the

completed image:

Four Faces and More

(Apologies for the strange cropping. Working on iPad)

Back in April I put up a post in which I claimed Compressionism as the moniker that defined my art. Four Faces presents an interesting ripple in that "school of art." It would seem that no matter how much I strive to compress a variety of visual impulses into a single image, some will assert themselves. Human faces seem one type of these powerful images. Hence the dominance of the simple faces imbedded in a more complex set of compositions.

To carry on a bit. I had planned my next image to be based on a photograph of a metal sculpture of a carriage that sat on the kitchen table nook in Raleigh. And had begun the laborious task of removing all the extraneous parts of the photo to create the black and white "cartoon" that will serve as the basis of the composition. Here is the photo:

But then we got an opportunity to "house and dog" sit for family. Being hopeless dog lovers who realize we are no longer ready to be "real" dog owners, we gladly accepted.

The problem was I obviously could not go a week or so without an image to work on and "carriage" was nowhere near ready for use. So I hopped back onto my multi-terabyte external hard drive for another option. Happily I came across a b&w image from a decade or two ago that I called Toasting the Roses. [I now wonder if I had created the image around the time my older daughter married and legally became a Rose. Who knows? She and her husband are free to claim it!] Anyhow, I had never "finalized" the image with color. So I had the helpful guys at Staples print me out a 24x18 version that I am happily now working on. Here is where I am on it:

Carriage will just get bumped down the queue a notch.