Eloquence

When I took Deb Weiers's "Wonky Friends and Critters" course, I discovered her penchant for pairing images with words, wonky faces with a wonky alphabet she developed. Deb mostly chooses to find random faces in her paint and use sometimes random or individual words, but I soon began a practice of illustrating artists and writers (and others) whose deeds and words I admired.

I haven't done one for a while, but I've been saving a bunch of reference photos, and today I chose the simple eloquence of poet and writer Maya Angelou. She has made lengthier statements of principle and practice, but for me, the brevity of this accentuates its importance: "When you know better, do better." How many times have we wailed "But I didn't know!" or "I didn't mean it!" when confronted with bad behavior? Maya's answer is simple: Now you do, so change your intentions and your behavior, both.

I had a bit of a struggle to capture the likeness, and although I do think it looks like her, her expression is dour and without sparkle compared with the reference photo from which I worked. Serious is good—but she looks a little cheesed off! I also once again had to knock back the stencil pattern I incorporated by dimming it with white paint, because it fought with the image when at full strength. And, as usual, some of the bottom is cut off because of my scanner page depth.

"Do Better"—Uniball pen, watercolor, stencil, acrylics (background), gold pen, and gesso, on Strathmore 140-lb. watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.