Flying Girl is Many People, or Sketch Faces Pattern

Flying Girl is Many People, or Sketch Faces Pattern
012/100 in 100 Creative Challenge, 6/12/09
Golden Fluid Acrylic and Prismacolor Watercolor Pencils on Moleskine Watercolor Paper, 5x8"

This is only two colors of paint and a sienna pencil. I like the interplay between paint and pencil, how it changes the color of the paint. I painted outside of the face sketches first, and then the inside, because I didn't want them to blend too much. I didn't want to paint over the drawing, I wanted to incorporate the drawing. So there are still edges. Still places where there is only pencil or only paper or only paint.

Is this creepy? The ghosty little half formed faces? I still like it.

Sometimes I feel like we are all made up of a million different people. A million different choices. A million different personalities. A million different answers.

Then we do something like paint pictures or write stories and those people show up. Made out of nothing but imagination and some paper.

Sometimes I am amazed that paintings I do today weren't there yesterday. They weren't just unformed, they didn't exist. It's not like they grew out of something else. They weren't anything.

Afterwards, sometimes, it feels like they have always been there. Like they are significant or familiar. Some gain in importance, some fade. My first flying girl was way back in 1992 in college. I did not know that she wasn't just an expression of my anxiety and excitement over my upcoming graduation from college. I did not know that she would reappear in various forms over the next 17 years. I didn't know that she would become significant again almost two decades later.

Where do these mysteries come from? Who are these mysterious selves we hold inside of us, and in what form will they show up next?