Monthly Archives: April 2016

Waiting on a lady.

graffitiresto by Suzanne Forbes April 28 2016I made this drawing while waiting for a lady from my recovery program and feeling a lot of grief and frustration about the inexorability of death.

My boyfriend Rob died thirty years ago, but I still don’t know how to fit his death into the world. Experiencing spring in a place with a New York climate again brings it all back like a freight train.

I found the invite to Ava and Conor’s wedding in my papers yesterday. They were so goddam scintillating. So clever, so beautiful, so young. At least Conor left Finn in the world.

Most of Rob’s art was public, because he was a graffiti artist, and the last of his big pieces disappeared from Soho years ago. I look for his tags in every photo of 80s New York I see, but don’t find them. Kim Basinger walks past one on Spring St. in 9½ Weeks. I dream about walking New York, looking for his pieces.

The longer I’m sober, the safer I am, the more I can experience things; some of those things are really hard.

I came home from the restaurant (which is our neighborhood bistro, called…Graffiti) and just sat and cried for two hours. Just crying, just tears flowing out of me like they had all the time in the world. There is nothing I can do but keep doing, keep trying to do the best I can to be a better person, to make the best art I can, to be the best friend and wife and teacher I can. But Jesus, I miss him.

Venus finished, and an eye painting study.

I finished the painting of Bunny just a day after she left, in a sugar-fueled dawn-light sprint.

enus of Wilmersdorf by Suzanne Forbes April 21 2016

Venus of Wilmersdorf by Suzanne Forbes April 21 2016

Although I much prefer to paint my models at night, in electric light, I often finish the details of paintings in as much bright daylight as I can tolerate. While I was working on the details, I remembered a couple of things from when she was here.

As we worked, during the second sitting, Bunny talked about her days with the Glamour-Bombing group. And when she left, she paused in the hallway to take a long look at one of my very few creepy paintings, the one called Chupacabra.enus of Wilmersdorf by Suzanne Forbes April 21 2016

So I decided to give her fey eyes.

Or rather, the brush decided for me, surprising me, and I was pleased.

enus of Wilmersdorf by Suzanne Forbes April 21 2016

 

enus of Wilmersdorf by Suzanne Forbes unfinished 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the left you can she has a large, centered single highlight on each pupil and on the right, one small and one large on each pupil. You can also see the shadowing of her corneas has increased slightly on the left, making the the highlights seem brighter. This gives the effect that the pupils reflect light the way a cat’s eyes do (which is because the back of their eyeball has this reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum).

Then, because I was still thinking about the “spooky eyes” phenomenon today, I made a couple of eye studies.Suzanne Forbes eye study April 2016

 

As you can see, the highlight in the “regular” eye is offset to the left and double. In addition, it is placed below the shadow meridian cast by the eyelid. The whites of the cornea are most prominent to the sides of the pupil, while in the “spooky” eye the brightest whites gather below the pupil, emphasizing the reflective property of the eye.

I’m not a fantasy artist, but I thought this analysis, based on the style of old-school horror and fantasy artists like Bernie Wrightson and Jeffrey Catherine Jones, might be helpful!