The Clock Watcher

Sometimes I'll start a painting and not finish it for a year or two. Or 20. I found some canvases at my mother's house that I had started in high school and never finished. (I graduded in 1991). And then I finished them, all these years later. Then there are paintings like the one shown above, which I started this evening while I was watching a movie. The movie was Wolfman, from 1982. It starts off with one of the most striking visuals I've seen in anything outside a Dario Argento film, and is peppered with other wonderful visual moments.

For the record, I watch movies almost exclusively for visuals -- the more garish and lurid and striking, the better. My favorite films are always interesting to look at. So even if it's not a great piece of cinema I get a lot of out of them. Anyway, this movie had at least three scenes in it that inspired sketches and this is the first painting. It has NOTHING to do with anything in the movie. There's just a moment in the film where a dark haired woman is standing in an antique store by a wall of clocks. I put a similar woman in a dark green, malachite hued dress, and gave her a knife, for this painting. I wanted her to be a little unsettling, but is she the threatener, or the threatened? At any rate I think she will be able to handle whatever lurks outside of the frame. Just imagine the cacophony of all of that ticking.