The Skipper

Skip is one of our finest models, originally named "the little skipper", he grew up on a fishing boat in Boston.  He speaks African languages and is fluent in Italian.  That is only the beginning.

Singer

Another quick oil sketch I had intended to complete, but liked it as it was.

Oil Sketch

An oil sketch from a few years back.

Five Pointed

I looked in the mirror and my bed head made me look like an oompa loompa. Then I realized I could turn my head into a star.

Alice

I saw Alice with her boyfriend at my favorite local Restaurant, the Root Cafe, and had to ask her to sit for my portrait class before they left town.  I don't know if the portrait is "finished", but I like the head.

It happens her name is also the title of one of my favorite Tom Waits songs.  Enjoy.

Self-Portrait as a Family Tree (Age 36)

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.

Golden rectangles in the human body

These are screen shots from Disney's "Donald in Mathmagic Land", one of my favorite cartoons as a kid. I first Watched it when I was six or seven while my sister roller skated on the front porch. I've looked at several sources online to understand the golden section in the body, but this is the simplest and easiest to understand. The fact that the sides of a pentagram could fit perfectly into the proportions of a human body was so amazing to me as a child I couldn't believe it was true.

I've posted this video before but in case you missed it here it is again.