Rosie, Roller Girl

Rosie, Roller Girl

This is a new 24M Photoshop painting.  The inspiration came from an "orphan" vintage photo.  Called orphan, because the provenance has been lost.  The original photo amazes me.  It is a black and white recording of a euphoric girl. What is her story?  Where is she now? A bit of intense past tense has been preserved. The back ground looks like a bombed out city, with piles of masonry rubble.  

I imagined a story for her.  I think that the picture was taken in a European city just after WWII. Rosie was born in a bomb shelter. She came into a world where the air reeked with  fear and death.  The bombs fell everyday until almost everything was destroyed. Fire and grief rained from the sky.  Anyone could die at any minute.  For Rosie's first few years, she lived in hell.

Just when it seemed that the world would and should end, when every soul was bruised or broken, when  depression and dread were a daily diet,  then, D-Day dawned. The good guys won. The adults celebrated,  the horror was over. There was a rebirth of Hope. Mom found skates that fit her daughter.  The new skates were the best thing that ever happened to this precious child.  She could zoom.  So this is how pleasure feels.

 Original Photograph

In my picture of her, I put her in a rose bower, because she has been with the disaster rubble for long enough.

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I worked on this digital version over a period of a few weeks.  I would like to do an oil painting version.  It takes me varying periods of time to do a canvas painting.  I have been working on "Mary and Krishna", for six weeks, hope to finish next week. Then I will photograph the finished painting, tweak it again in photoshop, and publish it. The digital version is already in this blog.  I like the circularity of repeating favorite images in pixels and paint, paint and points of light.

  Several digital pictures are completed for every canvas painting that I have the time to do.  The digital px's serve as detailed plans for the oil paintings.  I have more images than time, they hover overhead, as numerous as copters over Louis Armstrong Airport after Katrina. It is nice to be able to choose the best image.

I have been practicing Photoshop for eleven years.  I have been painting all my life.  Photoshop is a medium that offers some versatility that does not happen with real paint. You can make new versions without destroying the old versions.  I  get excited when I print out a new pixel px. It is a better experience to see it on paper than on a monitor.  Oil on canvas is even more immediate and more intense than the prints.  

Oh, that business, my family apology, in my last blog. Not sure I want to air my dirty laundry publicly.  Can I erase it? And the apology?  The children say they do not read my blog.  Most likely they are wary of being embarrassed.  They should be concerned,  I am not finished paying them back for throwing raging baby tantrums in Walmart yet.

We had a wonderful 4th of July.  The food has been so good.  The place is looking wonderful.  The creek is cool for swimming.