The Year That Was
As the dial gets reset to 01/01…
No white Christmas in Toronto and across Canada this year. The Great White North has been grey and muddy mostly. I am kind of grey and fuzzy as I have COVID for the first time. My body aches have subsided enough to consider typing, but cogent thoughts…no promises. Insert ad for Vick’s NyQuil here.
So, sharing some of the images I made as 2023 started seems like a good idea. I really do see the New Year as an opportunity to rethink, reset, and keep moving forward. I have started some of that planning already and will share some of my ideas…next year—in a week. I began 2023 expanding on my Crime Seen series of characters from TV crime serials. I had done a charcoal portrait of Jamie Dornan in his role as an amnesiac with a deadly past in The Tourist and worked with digital overlays. The piece won inclusion in American Illustration Annual 42 and 3x3 Annual 20.
More Crime Seen additions with Liev Schreiber as a fixer for the famous with some family issues in Ray Donovan.
A series that is a must see with Gary Oldman portraying a character, Jackson Lamb that you can almost smell on the screen….Slow Horses.
This piece is really about Jeremy Bentham’s 1785 evil idea of the panopticon prison. This addition to the Crime Seen series is from the film, The Informer, starring Joel Kinnaman. Yes, I probably should have done, The Killing, but the prison design needed a portrait and I had Robert Blake’s hands from the film, In Cold Blood, already painted. Also, Kinnaman is heavily tattooed in the film and the overlay graphic does a bit of double duty.
This last piece was a bit of a mashup, which is apt considering the inspiration. The Luther TV series are excellent, Idris Elba as John Luther is mesmerizing…the film—Luther: The Fallen Sun, doesn’t do the series justice.
Thanks for reading this year and my 40th post to end 2023. Happy New Year! I wish you all good health (that’s for sure) and a wonderful reset in 2024!