Self Portrait, Mt Vernon

Self-portrait with Mount Vernon. This is another case where I started the piece some years earlier. There’s a four-year difference between start and finish. I’d painted the landscape there and it, that hasn’t changed too much, although I kind of darkened it and made it a little more of a sunset picture, and then I later I got the idea to paint this.

Okay, so the distant landscape, this Mount Vernon, New York, the landscape in the small mirror, it’s a mirror that I’ve placed behind my head there, that reflects a view from my high-rise apartment in Denver, so it’s two different landscapes and different time of day, but when there’s a sunrise or sunset, if you look one direction, the color of the lights can be one.

And if you look at, say you have a mirror image toward the opposite direction, the light’s going to be a completely different color purple. That’s how I’m rationalizing the difference here. But compositionally it made a really powerful impact against the figure. And so this is another case where even four years, there’s a little bit of aging going on and I dated it, but again, partly because I changed the light so much that I had to change the the figure to the head.

I put that striped shirt on primarily because I wanted a real deep, dark black accent there at the bottom to bring the piece forward. It turns out I really didn’t need to because there’s enough other dark stuff. But at the time I thought I needed to, it’s a see-through version of myself. Again, it’s just a thing that appeals to me, and part of the reason why I did that was because that landscape element in that tree had was painted so well. I didn’t wanna lose it, so I, made myself a little bit transparent there.