David's Car Accident Canvas - In Process

Since June 17th of this past summer, since David's car accident, he's been asking me to do a canvas, a mixed media piece, just SOMETHING, as a reminder for him, a talisman maybe? I'm not sure. I told him that when I could approach it without crying [bawling, howling], I would work on it. This weekend saw me spending the entire two days on this. Sketches abounded -- I am NOT the drawing type, especially figures, especially someone I know so well, someone so close to me. No -- I wasn't trying to be detail-accurate in the sense that it had to look just like him, be a 'good drawing'. I was trying to be detail-EXACT in what I saw/felt when I saw him in the hospital, in Surgical I.C.U. [David about 8 days after accident] I think that's even harder to do than a seriously accurate, realistic figure drawing. But I finally got it in a sketch. I also bought this paint texturizing powder -- added to paint, it makes it gritty, sandy. I needed it to look like the masonry wall David drove his car through, but the pieces of real masonry bricks that I had collected at the scene were too heavy & not flexible enough for my vision for this piece. So I made my OWN masonry wall, let it dry all day Saturday and Saturday night, then blasted it as if a car had gone through it, ripped it & tore it into a pile of rubble. Kinda cathartic, actually!

So here is the canvas, about 1/2-way complete. There is a ton of touch-up I want to do to his figure -- his skin is a much lovelier cinnamon-brown color, not so yellowy. His right arm (on our left) is too spindly. The blanket has no movement, shadows or folds or such. I want to add some metallic shine to the hospital bed frame. Also & most importantly, when I first saw David, they had his hands restrained -- it was making him (already medicated out of his gourd) insane with frustration. I'm going to drill holes through the wood base and tie something through it to make the restraints. I have to add the first words he said to me, then, finally, I'm creating a 'curtain' (like those flimsy things they drape to give hospital patients in joint rooms some privacy) ... it will be muslin with transfers of photos of what was left of his car, and some personal words I'm going to add for David. And I'm mounting/hanging that curtain on a toilet tank level -- yes, I mean it -- with the flush handle mechanism to be on the back side of the wood base. David damn near flushed his life, not to mention his future, it isn't much of a reach for that symbolism!! I'll post another picture (maybe 2, depending on the process) when it gets closer to actually being finished.

I did an enormous amount of weeping this weekend, while working on this, just quiet tears seeping out of my eyes and rolling really slowly down my cheeks. But it felt cleansing, like release, like healing, which David is also doing beautifully! David on Labor Day Weekend.