Recently I spent some quality time with a long distance friend, in a private conversation on Facebook. It was nice. She needed an escape from her current woes, and as she loves my art, I was welcome to do a little show and tell with one of my current projects. She is quite taken with my technique(s), and so occasionally I’ll take the time to indulge her curiosity.

Through the course of explaining certain things, a new painting came into being. I described it as a marriage between two separate pieces. One is a bright & colorful and over a decade old. That’s “Palms Up”, as shown below. FYI, this is originally some simple streaks of ink markers on aluminum foil. Once those streaks were scanned, they were remolded into what you see here. The other picture is from this year – “The Rub” – based on an ink sketch on paper.

The marrying occurs when the image of one is layered on top of the other. The result of the consummation is something entirely different, yet holds a noticeable resemblance to each:

While the initial consummation only took a few minutes, the growth of the new creation took a little time . . . it has its own stages of development.

In this case though, my creation became two distinctly different figurative compositions, though the changes are minor in the big picture. And somehow The rub became more dominant over the poor palms. Trying to decide upon one of these new pictures over the other has become a real dilemma. Luckily, as an artist I am free to show you both. However, as in the parable of the chicken and the rooster, I cannot tell you which came first!

I’ll show you both pictures shortly. It took awhile to select the right titles, especially if I wanted to maintain the mystery of this chronology. So in the spirit of ladies first, I present to you, “Finding Wanda” followed immediately on the right by “Finding Waldo”.

I’m thinking of adding them both to my Saatchi Art Selections, hopefully in the next  day or so. But for now, out of curiosity, would you care to guess which came first? As to which one you prefer, I’ll leave that matter alone . . . none of my business . . . and I don’t want to make any political statement on the matter.