Facebook Fridays: Painting. Kittens. Green.

So it's not quite Friday, but I'm sure it will be by the time I'm done writing this post. It's been a pretty crazy week. I think this method of microblogging is really working because I don't feel like I have to store up all these things in my head until the next time I get around to putting them down. I can pretty much update my status from my phone and forget all about it until that coming Friday.

The Perplexing Practice of Portraiture

I said last week that I'm choosing not to display my recent art to people unless they contact me with serious inquiries.  I'm still standing firm on that, but I had to go out with a bang.  So I put together a YouTube video of the creation of my most recent piece: Marley & Me.  The video got 25 hits in the first few days, and I've already had a serious inquiry about it.  The thing about this painting is, though, that the face actually looks nothing like Bob Marley.  You know it's supposed to be him because of the reggae-esque music playing in the background as I paint using only the colors red, yellow and green, leaving the black background in the shape of dread locks.  Yet without the context of the piece as a whole, the face is just a face - it's not his face.

That's the weird thing about doing portraits.  It's ridiculously easy to make it look like a face.  Picasso painted a veritable Mr. Potato Head atop the body of each of his subjects, yet they still pass as human faces.  However, recreating a specific person's face is much more difficult.  They say that to make a face recognizable, accentuate the prominent features.  I've found that it's the exact opposite when it comes to painting realism.  The familiarities are in the subtleties.  I decided to do this painting upon finishing another portrait of someone with whose face I am extremely familiar.  It turned out fantastically.  I guess I got prideful and thought that if I could do one face, I could do them all.  Every time I make noticeable progress in my skill as a painter, I'm inevitably reminded of the long way I still have to travel.

A Tale of Two Kitties

When we got the twin kittens, we had just seen my little sister's performance in the musical Cats.  The whole premise of the musical is that every cat has not only the name by which humans choose to call it, but also another name with which it is innately born, and no two cats have the same name.  So although we named the kittens Max (short for Maximus) and Appa, they showed us through time that their true names are Leopoleon and Alistasia.

And Leopoleon peed on me in my sleep.

I can't really blame him though, seeing as how I'm dead-set on toilet training them.  We are currently in phase 3 of the process, which involves a bowl of litter set inside the toilet seat.  I think it's brilliant because I love the thought of never having to buy (or clean up) litter for the rest of their lives.  However, one of their lives is en route to a screeching halt unless he finds a better way to show his disapproval of my toilet training methods.  Appa's a good girl.  I feed her bacon.

Accidental Activism?

I'm not sure if being eco-friendly is considered activism...I think the term these days is "environmental awareness."  I didn't mean to go green, honestly.  It was a completely selfish transition, fueled by frugality and the desire for more money.  It all started when I woke up at 4:30 one morning with the burning urge to check my Facebook on my phone.  The screen was blinding in the midst of my otherwise pitch-dark room, so I turned the brightness on the screen all the way down.  I've left it that way ever since.  It's done wonders for my battery life (and surprisingly, my eyes).  In the spirit of battery saving (and thus less time spent sucking power out of my wall to charge the dang thing), I also turned off my 3G network.

Then, our best friends just re-did all the lighting fixtures in their house, so naturally we did what any good best friends would do: we took their old fixtures from their attic when they weren't home.  Mostly because they have fans, and we live in Tejas, where it's stupid hot.  So now that we have fans in our ceilings, we don't use the A/C as much.  And speaking of A/C, we also went out and bought a digital programmable thermostat with an Energy Star option which essentially programs the thermostat to use the least amount of energy and save us the most money possible.

So there you have it.  I managed to pull off painting a portrait of Bob Marley without actually having to paint his face, our kittens are blog-worthy because they pee on people, and we have effectively reduced the amount of energy we use on a regular basis.  I hope it shows in our energy bill.  But if not, at least I can take comfort in knowing that we are one step closer to being "that couple."

This is all for now.  See you next week, and remember to avoid the Noid.
-R.

P.S. Hey look at that, it's Friday.  I win.