Three Portraits of Thao

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 36x48

This painting had an unpromising beginning. One may have a different opinion, and maybe now I am that one seeing a merit in arbitrariness. This is the reason I want to paint in very different manners; I don't want to deny other ways of reacting to reality. Paint reacts the way it wants, and I like to be present, to coexist in the moment. So when after I've seen Thao to the door and reentered the cave, I emptied yet another cup of coffee and got very angry with this painting, but it was too late already and time to go to bed. On the verge of falling asleep I convinced myself that the only way to fight the looseness, which at that drowsy moment spelled the lousiness of Tao's portrait for me, was geometry, but Thao was totally organic, so geometry had to include elements of nature. The landscape in the square within the diamond is illusive, because I painted it on reversed side of the Mylar sheet to be seen through the film. It made it easier to include it into the allover Russian Avantguard Geometrical composition, at least according to my thinking at that time.

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 36x48

Geometry was not totally out of merit, but I missed Thao's femininity. In the next portrait I also reflected on the inversion of the world; the paradise birds are singing upside down around Thao's torso. They, too, exist in the parallel world on reversed side of Mylar.

 

ED. 2014 acrylic/mylar 36x48