As the date of my art exhibition approaches, the task list gets strangely longer rather than shorter. But it’s still pleasing to see what little items I can tick off of the list as I’m piling new items onto it below. Two steps forward, one back, and so goes life.

At the moment, one of the tasks is to be sure I’m documenting each piece reasonably well so that I’ll have a truer record of what I did and what I put in the exhibition. But I’ve made it a little awkward for myself (longtime visitors here and other friends will not be surprised at this regular occurrence!) by doing tons of works with shiny, iridescent, high-gloss, translucent, and other kinds of colorations and techniques and media that are hard to pin down in photos. The first new painting I did for this show is a classic example.

Ella Goes Platinum—and multicolored, iridescent, and scintillating. Visually and musically. Yes.

When I did this Ella Fitzgerald portrait, I did my usual hybrid of drawing and painting on canvas, layering individual colors and small sets of them at a time and letting some show through windows in subsequent layers and others, merely by virtue of not being blocked out by the next layers’ transparency or thinness. Which suits my approach fine, but as a finished product makes for something that looks different in every light and from every angle. I made a tiny video clip just to prove my point, and even video doesn’t seem to get the whole of the thing. Obviously I’m not going to be having any exhibitions of my work either as a rock-solid documentarian or a filmmaker!

But I’ll keep doing what I can. I’d like to have a catalogue at the end of all of this that at least works as a souvenir—shareable in print as a book, if I’m lucky—and perhaps even as a portfolio of sorts. After all, I do like making books of various kinds. Of course, that leads me back in some kind of infinity loop to cataloguing all of my publishable images, or at least the thousands of them that are in printable formats. Trust me to find endless ways to make more work for myself.

Good thing I enjoy my work! Not that I don’t like sleep, too, and other life activities. Not very good at setting boundaries and finding the exact life balance I want. I hear that’s a common disease among the self-employed and artists and all others of my ilk. But it’s a trick to get my inner eye closed and my brain silenced for the night when they want to keep springing new ideas on me without much regard for the hour. I’m hoping that it’ll abate for a while after this exhibition is packed away again.

Because I’m nothing if not a fantasist. Oh, you noticed.

Overtones. An abstract representation of soundwaves interacting. And also, naturally, of light and layers and media and all of the other things involved in my paintings. Not to mention the interactions of my buzzy little synapses that won’t shut up when I’m trying to get to sleep. Me, I will shut up for now. See you later!