Pretty Real Behind the Veil

Ok, so I slept on the last version, and thought there was something missing from the “story,” thought it needed some fine tuning to the background, maybe detailing in the image, but as I’ve been learning about this process every time I do it, is that the process gives the lessons to me, and I get them when I get them.  When I woke up yesterday morning, I knew that the core image was only a piece of the story that the picture needed to show.  It needed to be put into context, and in doing so, the big picture of what I was really trying to express started to unfold.  I didn’t see it, and I didn’t see the layers that I have carried around for so many years, layers of shame and blame and self-contempt for every misstep in my life, even before I ever committed them.  But I’m jumping ahead.  These figures needed to be put into a context to be able to answer the question, “What was I thinking/feeling then?”

I searched for a background image that would enable me to complete the picture.  What I found in an old magazine was this:

Lovely picture from an old magazine about old movies, in fact.  The only problem with the picture, is that there is a woman standing in the middle of the picture.  Other than that, it has all of the missing elements.  The wooded setting was/is idyllic for me.  It’s where I felt a sense of peace and belonging.  And then there is that looking glass, a perfect combination for me because I was never 100% sure which side of the looking glass I was on.  This is the perfect combination to round out the context for this picture to enable me to tell the whole story about the state of my mind in this image, and sets the stage to tell the story that I would really say to my son at that time.  So how to address integrating these elements with my current painting?  Remove the woman and draw what belongs there in my story:

A gnarly old tree trunk in a forest does not interfere with my story.  In fact, I like this picture by itself, even outside of the story. I drew this with charcoal and graphite pencils, utilizing some of the light of the woman’s image to the extent that it works.  Now I have an altered photograph, over which I will overlay my working image, then continue.