Megan

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 36x48

I heard many times from marines on the radio, that the best marines are dead. As a civilian, I can add that the best civilians rebelled and fell out of the system. The world, therefore, is not the best place.  

Amy&Kev

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 38x48

Music, songs and love. Rebellious nonconformism with no room for cynicism. Usually, when I work on a painting that hard, I put it on reverse, flip it over, that is, to allow the immediate mess of artistic process to cover up for too obvious conscious decisions. This painting has a reversed side, too, and I have a feeling that Amy&Kev will prefer it when adding this painting to the art already hanging on the walls of their  Kensington, Philadelphia townhouse. They are artists, they know best.      

He and She

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 48x38

He and She in this painting are painted on different sides of the the same sheet of mylar. 

Family Portrait with Flowers

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar48x38

I bent towards two-sided painting out of frustration. Lucky coincidence, or whatever you say to make it feel better. Just one more try before inexorable failure, no one would care to count my countless mistakes. This one I consider a victory, though. That last shot was right on target.   

Youth

 

ED. 2013. acrylic/mylar 34x48

I painted you awkwardly and awkward. You seemed to not to care. You told me that you had confidence. I was at awe. None of us is secure in the face of life, but confidence... what a precious gift it is! Let your confidence help you in life along with your intelligence and beauty!  

Lara, reversed

 

ED.2013 acrylic/mylar 34x48

This painting has another side, the façade, so to speak. Lara was not shown the side you are looking at, the reverse*, as I call it. You don't expect me to show the subjects my trial and error, do you? Yet, this is my side of choice. Here it is, for you and me only. 

What do we like about it? A pentimento - the reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist? A coarse texture of careless lines usurping the softness of painting? A grotesque distortion of human shape and proportions so out of place in this case? The near ElGreco-istic formation a golden halo around the head of this blight deconstruction of childless Madonna?
When the enlightened Europeans were first introduced to the X-Ray images, some voiced a concern that with the ability to see through the skin, humanity will lose the sense of beauty. They didn't know then that vision and perception are not the same. The latter is never fixed.
* Mylar is a translucent, durable polymer film, which shows the reverse, unintended side of a painting.         

 

Bertille, a French Student

 

ED.2013. acrylic/mylar 34x48

When male new acquaintances ask me if my accent is French, I know that I have impressed them. 

Bertille is our neighbors' French exchange student of the highly acclaimed engineering school in Paris suburbs. An avid reader and a serious athlete she is the only female in the class of twenty.

Bertille fishes for words to answer my questions as I paint her at the cave. English is not her tongue.

Bertille, where is your accent from? Is it French? I am impressed!

Dreams

 

ED.2014. acrylic/mylar 38x48

 Dreams are a part of life 

They may happen at the dark of night and in the bright of day.

You are looking at a daydream. 

Michael Keane, the real life musician, descended into the cave with his guitar. He got us lost in the stream of his sound-thought. 

 It made me dream the dream my brush couldn't brush away 

Ballet Dancer

 

ED. 2014. acrylic/mylar 36x48

Pentimento is an Italian word. It describes the traces, which sometimes shimmer through layers of thinned paint. They reveal the thought process of a painter. 

In the portrait on this page the lines you see are the process and at the same time the hint to the movements, because my subject is a dancer. Her face her fingers, her arms and shoulders are trained to draw the silhouettes in the limelight and in the shadows they caste.

Pentimenti is a name of a gallery on the 2nd Street in Philadelphia http://www.pentimenti.com/ 

It represents my husband, Mark Khaisman www.khaismanstudio.com/

 "What a coincidence!" you exclaim. Indeed! This is how I squeezed just another foreign word in my obese vocabulary.     

Doug

 

ED. 2014. acrylic/mylar 36x48

 A soft-spoken sport plane pilot and a local politician, you were  favorably glancing at your appearance in the sheet of mylar, nervously modeled by my guessing brush.  I felt strongly apprehensive. Such was the power of your manhood. 

The One of Two

ED. 2013. acrylic/mylar 36x48

The best thing about painting Andenew was what he had to say about male friendship. I am lucky to know both friends and have painted portraits of each. What a treat !

Alexandra

 

ED. 2013. acrylic/mylar 34x48

Thank you, Alexandra, for visiting the cave. You were one of my first victims; maybe the first one to truly shape herself into a good painting. How did you do that? I was lost at the beginning, didn't even giving a tilt to your head. Then, in the half-sentence, you raised your hand with a sigh to move the hair falling onto your forehead. This gesture was to the sheet of mylar on my easel what a 

moon-glade is to the ocean waves. Since then I believe in my power to paint.

A Portrait of a Young Girl, revirsed

ED, 2014, acrylic/mylar 24x12

Mylar is a highly durable translucent polymer film. It has some qualities of glass. I've spent almost a decade of early post-immigration years as an employee of khaismanstudio, the stained glass studio owned by my husband, Mark Khaisman. Mylar is a continuation of tradition, an adaptation of many tricks I learned while painting Catholic saints on the traitorous surfaces of glass. "Reversed" is but one of many. It is what you see when you flip the film after you have painted on its other side.

Anna

 

ED. 2013. acrylic/mylar 36x48

Besides us, Anna is one of the few Russians 

proud-to-live-in-Jenkintown. We read each other well. It would be more complicated have we not left our old country behind. There, surrounded by the multitudes of native speakers of our own verbal and nonverbal, we would have been lost in the nuances of meaning. Here, by juxtaposition to foreign vernaculars and gesticulations, which, try as hard as we may, will always escape our full internalization, we present no mystery to one another.