In many ways this is Mel. But in so many ways it’s not. While on vacation, with a few days off from painting, I was itching to work. We sat down across from each other, Mel on the couch under a lamp and I just across from her on a living room chair, watercolor block on my lap. I was excited to get back to the materials and really had no interest in formal accuracy, nor the outcome. My focus was on feeling . . . the feeling of how the brush, loaded with pigment and water, goes down on the paper, the kolinsky hair spreading, releasing a pool of color. The forms that I ended up creating are Mel’s but so much of me is here too, sculpted into this portrait.
