Who Are These Women?

My  Apparition; 10" x 13," oil pastels on Strathmore drawing paper.

Does this woman look like this woman? Who is this who keeps creeping into my drawings? I did this drawing thirty four years ago. Then a gal who bears  resemblance to her doodles up two days ago on the iPad. Who is this woman and why does she haunt my art?

"THEY" (psychologists/psychiatrists), say we tend to draw faces when left on our own. We've seen so many of them  in our lifetimes, some get tucked away in our subconscious till they spill out in drawings years later.

The iPad woman, Mrs. Aster I've named her, reminded me, while I was drawing it, of this drawing from 1978. I hunted it down and pulled it out of an old portfolio. Sure enough there is a resemblance. Who the hell is she?  Then I went around the house looking for the other faces I  had made up spur of the moment.  Thankfully, they didn't look like her. They were  incomplete by comparison.


Free association drawing  can be very successful for as long as you can keep consciousness out of the picture.  You can for a while, but eventually your head comes back and you start making judgments on values and composition and balance, blah-blah.  While you started with just a pencil, soon you find yourself popping up and down going for your oil crayons, your acrylics, whatever you think is  necessary to solidify,  finish the job and figure out  exactly what it is you are doing. And that's when a doodle becomes an art piece.

Another head that appeared magically.

 Some doodled artworks are more imaginative and unique than others. The better ones are  those where you still have a feeling something more should be done, but you don't know what it is, so you just stopped.  If  you were  lucky, you were smart enough to leave well enough alone, sign it and walk away. Sometimes, you never signed it. Such was the case of the women who haunt me in my living room nightly.

These two heads in my very large painting in my living room tug at the anatomist in me regularly to come fix them . I absolutely won't. Their malformed, ambiguity is, I suspect, the life of the painting and what the painting is all about. If I fix the short-comings, I'm sure I'll kill it. So, I've never titled it. I never signed it. For all I know, I might still be living it?

This head showed up first in the painting process.  It's the head of a young bride,
at least that's what I suppose she is . She's running towards the right of the painting.
She's wearing stiletto pumps with a red bow and yards of tulle.

She's stopped  midway by a giant, seated female  figure with this head that
has no cheek bones, hardly a chin and a smashed in nose, not at all anatomically correct.
 This unfinished figure is motioning her to come closer--maybe luring her closer?

And the story ends far right with a straight forward,  nude, buxom female
 and the profile of a larger head looking back.


PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ABOVE THREE PAINTINGS ARE  THREE DETAILS FROM A MUCH LARGER 
PAINTING, (12'-0" X 6'-0"), THAT COVERS AN ENTIRE WALL.  IT'S A FREE ASSOCIATION  PAINTING i PAINTED IN 1980.