A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Dancing Bali Boys


This gouache painting is based on a photograph by Dominic Alves. He goes by the name Dominic's Pics on Flickr. I'm branching out a bit in this painting because, unlike many of my portraits, here I include the background. I'm starting to include more details in my work which I find exciting. I'm still definitely into the gouache. So, I've been doing a painting a day for the last four days or so and I want to try to keep up the pace. The more I work, the more I learn. I figure if I do a lot of paintings it will allow me to experiment more. With this painting there was no blue in the photograph, more oranges, greens and yellows, but blue is the complement to orange, so, at the last minute I added some washes of blue and I think it strengthened the painting. Though I've been painting on and off for many years, I still consider myself an intermediate beginner.

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