P270 Figure with Fossilized Knee

P270 Figure with Fossilized Knee
14x10" oil pastels and pencils on canvas
private collection

June 28, 2000: While the imprimatura was drying, I picked up a small canvas and made a pastel sketch from a quick charcoal drawing I had done in my sketchbook yesterday. This canvas, P270 (Woman with Fossilized Knee), is a more abstracted representation of myself as another Striation. I drew in one of the studio fossils, picked up years ago on the farm, and the same petrified shape appears on my knee. For this canvas, I have chosen to work in oil pastels, shaping them with a brush and thinner and scribbling in them with oil pencils. It is a pleasant medium for outdoor work. In fact, I worked outside on it until it started to rain.

This evening I took the small canvas, P270, in the living room while I sat with David, and scribbled and dabbled at it for a while, even while I talked on the phone with Jason. The pastel layers are working up nicely, though I might have done the imprimatura in acrylic.

The woman in P270 is clutching her knee, which has sprouted a fossil. No doubt she wishes it would drop off, for who wants to carry one's own fossil accretions, like barnacles? The fossil knee is too old to be useful, and too painfully heavy and stiff to be borne. It has formed an amazing shape, as fossils will, but is attached too obtrusively to her body to be appreciated. Perhaps the woman is worried that another one of her collections will attach itself to her. Years of accumulations, so difficult to get rid of, so easy to acquire. A parka made of fossils, a carapace made of books.

Paleozoic Series