HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KID

My posts have been a bit serious lately, so this is just a bit of fun, and is a short one for a change.  When I started this digital painting I didn't know where it was going to go.  I painted it quite quickly, and the end result surprised me. 

Those eyes!  Dev says this painting makes him feel uncomfortable and he doesn't like looking at it.  I have to admit that I feel the same, even though I am pleased with it, and with the fact that the result was unexpected and very different from anything I could have imagined.

This Photoshopped version is great, but those eyes still bother me.

I always wonder why one chooses a particular idea or image as the inspiration for a drawing or painting, and how it is that the painting so often makes itself without conscious direction from the artist.

The inspiration for 'Here's Looking At You Kid' came from the photograph below of one of Antony Gormley's statues on Crosby beach, which I wrote about in a previous post. 

Even though I hadn't looked at the photographs since writing that post, this photo has kept coming back into my mind.  The flat circles (which Gormley deliberately left from the casting process) intrigued me, and I felt I needed to do something from this picture.

When I imported the photograph to Photoshop the first thing I did, without even thinking, was to draw round the circles .... and then they turned into eyes.

So that was the source of that particular piece of creativity - without that initial image this painting could never have developed.

The chance to take the next photo is one of those happenings that are absolutely serendipity.

I had prepared this blog post in advance because we're going through a very busy period at the moment.

Then last Saturday morning we were walking down to the Liverpool Tate Gallery at the Albert Dock for our third morning of the Drawing the Line course.

Suddenly I saw these words on the pavement (sidewalk) in front of me.  They were advertising a Sky exhibition by Doug Aitken, and they seemed so appropriate for adding to this post - magic!