Tammy is that woman that believes that money is the root of all happiness. You probably know her. She’s a combination of Norma Desmond and Donna Reed. She was probably happy once.
Like most everything I do, this is primarily about color and form.. technique and experimentation; It started as a sort of vague portrait of Tammy… the figure’s probably obvious, the green form is a mirror and the pearls are just sort of suggested here and there. It was generated from an automatic drawing that I tweaked just a bit.
Tammy’s preparing for a night on the town. This was meant to be a sort of comment on aging, misplaced priorities and so on… Nothing I do is really that specific though. I’d love to be able to express what Kathe Kollwitz could. It’s not really a priority though. 🙂
I found Tammy, and the idea of a woman crying into her mirror as she prepares for one more pointless evening, to be far too depressing to actually paint. On the other hand, I couldn’t get her out of my head for the entire time I did work on this. The brightish colors are probably a sort of reaction to that… my escape.
This is 18×24… oil on a commercial, canvas panel.
Studio Time 
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