On HER birthday

 

Today, the 14th of June, is my most excellent wife's birthday. 

An incredible person, my respect for her is only surpassed by my love.

And it would be impossible to overstate how much better she's made my life.

Odd, then, that in almost twenty years together, I've only included her in four paintings.

Les Deux - acrylic on panel - 24x18 - 2009.

À la nuit tombante - acrylic on panel - 24x36 - 2011.

G en travesti in men's clothing, me in a gown. Our relative heights were mucked about with here; in reality, I'm almost a foot taller than G.

Les Amis, les amants - acrylic on panel - 36 x 24 - 2014.

With our little dog, Nicholas.

There really is a "G" tattooed on my wrist; perhaps you'll get the reference...?

After 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' by Manet - acrylic on panel - 30x40 - 2021.

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Only four paintings? That's rather terrible; Nicholas has made it into SIX! Something really must be done about this situation....

Fruity - our annual holiday card, 2023 edition

 

Just a simple "reveal" of the seasonal-holiday-of-your-choice card that we've sent out this year. We alternate the design duties, and this year the job fell to G. Her most excellent and perverse brain conjured this fruitcake extravaganza, a group portrait of the artist Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family by Rubens serving as the base for the transformation. As she is currently crazy busy with a huge, teetering stack of freelance design jobs, in addition to her full-time day-job, I offered to do a little fine tuning of the image before handing it back for her to deliver the final polish. 

I must say I fared better in the "face/off". She took a rather flattering picture of me and pretty much just dropped it onto the original image; only Bruegel's ears are still showing. The image G used of herself was decidedly not so flattering. And it was not helped by her having to change the lighting to better fit the lighting in the painting underneath, and having the side of madame Bruegel's grayish cheek showing through. When I first saw the Photoshopped image, I commented on how ungenerous she'd been to herself. And I also asked if her rather grumpy expression was intentional. You know, for humor's sake. I mean, she has a gigantic fruitcake around her neck. I think a certain degree of grumpiness would not be an entirely unreasonable reaction if one found oneself so encumbered. But she only said, "That's just the way I look." Gentle readers, I am here to tell you that that is quite false! I see the very dear woman every day, and I can testify that she's actually a most attractive human who smiles frequently and generally possesses a very pleasant demeaner. Very.

Other than being gifted with a pair of inexplicable hands, I think Nicholas came off pretty well.

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Portrait of Jan Brueghel the Elder and his family, by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1613-15.

What day is it? Oh, yes....

 

Blog post Sunday falls on that holiday this year, so what more logical time to share our (Christmas) holiday card for this year? We always strive to be cheeky with the card we send out, but this effort might seem especially directed toward those - and there are many - who rather, for whatever reason, clearly loathe the particular holiday and all it brings in its tarted-up wake. (I so get it! Having worked in retail for many years, it's sometimes an effort to feel the "magic of the season", and Christmas music still makes me want to hurl.) 

But for all you others... Merry Christmas, happy all-the-holidays, and a most brilliant new year! 

Winking at the holiday - thirteen years of Christmas/New Year's cards

 

2020. Our current New Year's card... saying goodbye a year we would all like to forget.

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2019.

"Christmas-ed up" adaptation of the French-language poster for the 1946 film "The Killers."

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2018.

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2017. Obviously adapted from the famous "Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck.

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2016. This was the year that G's incredibly successful anthology "City of Weird" came out. Entirely her project, she edited the book, did the cover and all the art...

 ... and our card that year shows she still had plenty of "weird" to spare.

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2015. Or 2016, as the case may have been; we missed the Christmas deadline and saluted the new year instead.

G looks absolutely terrifying. I look all too natural, like that could be my actual hair-do.

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2014.

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2013. Almost certainly my favorite. (I'm guessing no one will really find that at all surprising...?)

I took copies - the originals were destroyed in the burning of the Tuileries; but then I'm sure you knew that! - of the two separate state portraits by Winterhalter...

... of Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie and made one big one. Added a few faces and a dog and that did the trick.

G always does well with a moustache.

Honestly, this is rather how I imagine myself...!

Though more gussied up in the final image, I think Nicholas looked nicer in just this simple diamond and pearl collier.

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2012.

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2011.

Freaky....

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There was no card in 2010. Neither of us can remember why....

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2009. Kind of cheating; we just cannibalized my painting "Les Deux."

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2008. Another of my favorites. I so loved the Deco background G concocted, that I hated we had to cover up so much of it.

An alternate (unfinished) version. For the figures, I took two color images of us in character as Madeleine and Penny Prévert, changed them to black and white,
and then re-colored them. Then I stuck the heads on bodies that were - both - adapted from mid-Thirties publicity pictures of Miss Joan Crawford. As one does.

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2007.

This was our first Christmas/Holiday card. This was the year we were "supers" together for the first time with Portland Opera. G had been a priestess in a beautiful production of "Norma" at the beginning of the year, but this was my first go 'round. Our "Carmen" had been transplanted to Cuba, circa the 1940s. I was a soldier in three of the four acts, but G had three costume changes: a cigar factory worker in the first, a fruit seller in the last and, in the second act, she was done up as a... "brothel employee", shall we say? I was in that same scene, so I mentioned to the stage director that we were actually married so, if he wanted, we could act a bit more frisky than the other supers who were not so intimately - and legally - acquainted. We were decidedly frisky and the whole production was really fun. At some point, all the supers took pictures in character, upstairs in the dressing rooms of the theater. Those were the images I used a few months later; my Photoshop skills were pretty feeble at the time, but I took us out of the theater and put us into images from the real Havana.

The doorway to the gritty streets of Havana in these two pictures was in reality just another solid concrete block wall.

My dear, sweet wife was quite convincingly blonde and slutty in the second act, but her big moment actually came in the previous one. Carmen's knife attack on her co-worker, Manuelita - a character who doesn't usually even make it onto the stage - is what gets her arrested in the first place, the arrest is what hooks her up with Don José and starts the whole mess rolling. This production decided to show Carmen's handiwork, and G - an X carved into her cheek - was her far from docile victim. She roared on, kicking and snarling, and got to have a downstage center fistfight with the star of the show before - literally - being dragged from the stage; as they say, you go, girl! Her most excellent outraged and bloodied face was just so cool that we had to include this picture on the back of the card - hey, Merry Christmas!

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Edit: It's a Christmas miracle! G just found our card from 2010; we didn't skip a year after all. She created it in a Word file and it somehow got lost. Glad to have it back in the line up!

2010!