Faces Painted Over

This here painting is the epitome of a painting where it started out as one thing and ended up as another. See, those stripes there were originally on a guy's back as he sat in a kitchen, the whole canvas turned 90 degrees.

I've found that if you leave part of the painting that you were doing before you got completely fed up, that you wind up with images you never would have come up with on your own.

I'm doing a painting now where I worked it and I worked it, involving a lot of a small faces and just couldn't get it to work finally. So instead I painted over the painting using yellow paint.

I might add here that I've done this before fairly recently, almost (as it turns out) in an identical manner. I had a bunch of small people with one large person, got fed up and painted over it in yellow. And then sold it.

It wasn't until this very moment that I realized that situation was almost identical. Perhaps there's a part of me, however, that isn't too surprised and it (this part of me) felt that if I sold one like that before I could sell another like it now.

This part of me that I'm describing appears to be in art solely for the money.

Well, the part of me that's in it for the art likes it when I paint over all these faces, and in this particular current case, you really can't tell there are faces under the paint. But I know they're there and it sorta makes the painting better (at least for me) knowing that. It also seems to me that there's a presence in this painting that wouldn't be there if those people weren't there.

All I can say is, if they ever xray this particular painting, they (and I like them whoever they are for xraying my painting) will be ever so surprised! I mean you see some of these xrays they've taken of old master paintings and you'll see that Titian, for instance, moved an arm a few inches to the left or sompin like that. You xray this painting and you're gonna see a whole bunkload of faces!!! They'd sorta be a blast from the past.

You know there's that robert rauschenburg piece of artwork where he takes a drawing by De Kooning and he erases it and calls it Erased De Kooning. I might start my own series called "Painted over faces"...or something like that.

It's not a bad idea, really, I think I'm gonna start working on it today. You will see the results (or you won't) shortly.