Cardona-Hine West Indies Girl 41 x 31
Alvaro and I both paint out of the paint itself. After putting on an undercoat of random, or not so random, colors, we each then move with the paint’s suggestions to find our subject matter. I usually use up whatever paint is left over from a previous painting; Alvaro just starts with paint out of his tubes, mixed right on the brush, and put on in free strokes. In some way, each of us is accessing intuition to lead us into the painting
West Indies Girl was painted in March, 2009, in Todos Santos, Mexico, where we stayed and worked for three months. The painting would have begun as explained above, and perhaps the head was first a sun above a horizon, them, as black was applied in other parts of the canvas, the face seemed a logical substitute and so the figure was born, the body loose and free and almost falling away into nothing toward the lower half of the canvas.
McCauley Leaving the Party 25 x 21
The woman in this painting appeared in the underpaint, not fully formed yet, but the rythmn of her body and her whole head were there for me to pull out. This sort of appearance has been happening with many others of my figures in the past couple of years. Of course I am looking, but I do not force them up out of the paint. When I looked closely at a darker spot where the face now is, that is what I saw–her face–and pulled out the fullness of it as you see it here.
I was not trying for a black, nor a Caribbean woman, but, not only the face, but the rhythmn of the body, the dress, the arms, all suggested both black and Caribbean. I added, on my own, the boyfriend/husband in the distance, hands so familiarly on the hips as he waits for her to say her final good-byes! How many of us women have seen our husbands out by the car, in front of the store, or at the door of a house waiting like that? I couldn’t resist. And the painting needed another focal point beyond her. I love this woman, her energy, and confidence. I even love the guy with his impatience.
