Kuy, Acrylic on paper, December 2010

I set out to draw better last year, and this was one of the portraits I got to finish in time for my thank you show.

Kuy is the diminutive (i.e. pet name or lambing) for Kuya or big brother, and this painting was a Christmas gift for my one and only big bro, Paolo.

I started off with a pencil sketch, referenced off a picture that wasn’t “boring” or in a normal frontal, smiling position:

I learned from doing mom and dad’s portrait that I need not detail the sketch so much– it’s really adding the colors that demands patience.

I filled in the easiest part first– the black background!–then got to work on the fingers, which I thought would give me a hard time…

It was the pointing index finger and thumb area that took a while, but I was happy with how they came out:

The face is always tricky– even a millimeter off and you’ll have a stranger before you.

I knew if I got the eyes and lips right, I’d get to bring out my brother’s smirk…

Another a lesson from my first acrylic portrait:  blend while the paint is still wet.

Voila!  I didn’t really want to go for photorealism, and chose a blurry reference picture on purpose.

At this point I knew my work was done:  My brother “came out of the painting”, said hello, and smirked his trademark smirk.

My friend Ericka with her mini-montalut
Pastel on paper, 1999

I gave paintings away to friends on my birthday as a thank you, but also as a social experiment: I wanted to see which works would most appeal to the people closest to me (and which wouldn’t), and who among my friends would actually do as I asked and send me a pic with their take-home goodie.

To date, I only have four pictures of friends with mini-montaluts, including the one above, which I took myself. Most of the paintings left behind I didn’t expect to be left behind. And it’s slightly disconcerting that some of my friends and family–people I’d expect to care about my art–couldn’t even be bothered to claim their freebie.

Do I hear the relevance question all over again now?

Acrylic on paper, July 2010

Go for the house on top of the hill!

I found these old cards I made for friends, maybe in 2000. Never got to give them away, would make for a good surprise now, 10 years after.

Interesting to see how I saw them then, and also how we related to each other then.

Reminds me of a passage I read in Julian Sleigh’s “Friends and Lovers”, that there are three things going on simultaneously in any friendship, and they are worth recognizing:
1. the changes going on within person A
2. the changes going on within person B
3. the changes going on within the actual friendship between person A with B

Sometimes we get stuck on just one of these sets of changes, and we fail to see objectively what the situation with a certain person presents, and what it demands of us.

I hope it’s not too late for these well-wishes to be received with the same love they were created 10 years ago

Hugs, friends!