I've only got a couple of weeks until my age is no longer divisible by twelve. In fact this will be my twelfth year in which my age is a prime number.
There are strands in my beard that appear bright red, presumably from some of the irish side of my family history. During this time I was doing heavy research on my family history, which became a terrible obsession. I began to think "What if each strand of my beard is an ancestor that I carry with me, and the whole thing is sort of a family tree? Which one is the knight templar? Which is one of the founders of New Amsterdam?" I then had a dream that I discovered even more bizarre colors in there representing very diverse characters back there. During the process of the piece I collected my palette scrapings onto the beard after each session. Scraping down to the lower layers now and then, some of the interesting colors show through. The painting is inspired by the self-portraits of Rembrandt.
