Post # 10 (Self portrait as a medicine cabinet)

Done right after Nicole and I married. We spent the summer living in our parents farmhouse as a sort of honey moon.....there are many "newlywed" allusions in this painting (but probably nothing to really blush about). It hinges and opens and closes like a medicine cabinet and stands at roughly 3.5 feet tall by 3 feet wide.

A portrait of my father

Since I've been digging them off the shelf....

This is one of the first portraits I did with oils on a larger sized canvas as well as one of the first portraits of my father (all in all, I painted close to 10 paintings of him before he passed on).

My father was diagnosed with cold agglutinin disease, which, simply put, is a disease affecting the body's ability to produce red blood cells. In cold weather, the disease causes the antibodies to bind and coagulate the red blood cells excessively, creating poor circulation and eventual organ failure.

There is no cure, but treatment is simple--stay out of cold weather. Simple enough unless you were my father, who spent most his waking hours on his feet and outside. The disease forced its way into his lifestyle and pushed him to change everything he valued in life: nature, the farm, a soft winter snow. To say it caused major disruption and dischord in the rhythym of his life would be an understatement.

This portrait was painted from pictures I took of him in the corner of a room in our old farm house, a room the family affectionately referred to as "the red room".

shadow theater

We are playing a show next Thursday at a place called the "Red Room", which coincidentally, is the name we have given a music project that Nicole and I recorded together on our 7th wedding anniversary (as of now, the recordings are in hiatus due to the circumstances of life and all our other separate endeavors.)

Anyways, I've been influenced lately by my friend Heath's shadow theater and all the dramatic intricacies that the dark shadowed characters invoke. So, I decided to rig up my own screen using a white queen sized sheet I found at Ross and give it a try with the band. We'll see if we can pull it off next week at the Red Room.

Incidentally, Lucian really enjoyed helping me make the screen. When we finished nailing and hanging it his little thespian side seemed to emphatically come out. Something about the "masking" of the screen helped him step out of his usual shy self and act in front of the whole family.---his favorite shadow theater move was simulating his head cut off, walking around like a decapitated zombie, and then reassembling himself for the finale.......interesting, we'll see what develops of this. The kids are already talking about what other stories we can do and props we can use.....old folk tales and greek mythologies may be ensuing...