Untitled

I'm so close to having completed my first fairly large drawing, granting that only a portion of the page is being utilized. I've tried going large before, this will be the first one I didn't abandon. Smaller might end up being my thing after all.

However, I have not been able to work on it for two weeks now. A family situation has arisen that has everyone struggling to cope. There's not going to be a happy resolution to it. It's a slow-motion unraveling that no one is prepared for. The issue at hand is a medical one centering on my father. The hospital and various insurance agencies are determined not to render care, and are trying to take our every last cent. I do not wish to discuss it here, nor with anyone. Jesseca knows. I have no intention of announcing it on Facebook as...well, I hope this doesn't sound dickish but people will want to be kind and wish us the best. And it means a lot, it does, but I can't deal with that now and have no intention of inviting it. This is a very bad time for everyone involved, and I do not see how it works out.

The drawing I am working on has two small areas left to complete. One should be easy. The other I attempted twice the same night and found that I was not on my game: after trying two different approaches and erasing both, I was in danger of ruining the paper for future efforts.

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Some progress today.  Worked about two and a half, three hours on this.  Stopped hopefully before a headache could set in.  Because this is a sketch, I'm not being overly carefyl on precise details of hair or the folds of her jacket.  I also will not be adding her earrings: she is wearing earrings in the source image but I cannot make out the details.  Maybe when the rest is done I'll find a pair online and fake it.  It would add a nuance that's missing.

Also did an hour on a color (ink)version crude and overly vivid.  Not a display piece, I hope to blend it with the pencil work in an  art program, see what I come up with.  there are at least two other variations I would like to try, and perhaps blend each of them.  If it the final blend turns out well, I'd like to get it printed on that metal paper I haven't looked into yet.  It does not yield a  metallic image, rather something about the base lends itself to images that are more colorful and have deeper black levels than regular photographic prints.  Entries in the Gresham Art Committee showings have been done on this paper, and I'm eager to try it out. 

I would like even once to be even half as much a surprise to Dana – a positive one – as she has been a constant surprise to me throughout my life.

She once wrote in a letter to me that remembered how cruel kids at school could be. I don't know what it might have been that prompted her to say that, something I wrote maybe...but I wondered at the idea that she had been targeted for that. I'd certainly had my share of it, but Dana – wasn't she one of the popular kids? Not one who got treated that way, I'd have bet. Many years later I spoke to someone who remembered her, and he related that Dana had been the one treating him that way. So maybe she was speaking ruefully from the other perspective

As presumptuous as it is to imagine I know anything at all o what's going in in Dana's head...fuck it, she's given me free license to think whatever I want. Why not? She's hardly objecting, is she?

What I think is this: when she imagined in me certain biases, I think she was projecting on me the beliefs she herself had grown up with. Maybe, possibly, she even saw herself that way – someone who had done wrong, someone who'd earned condemnation. And when I happened across her, it never occurred to her that I could see her any differently then what she was seeing. So she burned me before I could burn her. But if she was afraid of me judging her then, I sometimes think that ever since she has been even more afraid that I won't judge her – that I will accept her with love for whoever she really is.

I don't know what's left to say about Dana. There are more dreams I would like to place in context but nothing I care to make public for various reasons. I'd like to say that it will never be too late for her to talk with me, but...it's pretty late. I can't even see my own future let alone whether anything she has to say would make any difference later.

Should Dana want to write me, she can get my home address from Moony. Moon is on FB, she can reach him there. He also has my phone number, though I'd advise that all calls are screened and she'll get an answering machine first...that, and I really don't like talking on phones. I would love to have a letter from her.

If it's the last thing I ever say publicly about her (unlikely but ya never know), let it be that I'm proud of being her friend.

This is not acceptance of the loss. This is just saying I can't do any more.