Sugaring Season

Adaption of Sugaring Season
album cover, Beth Orton
12" x 12", oil on board, 2012

Beth Orton's brand new Sugaring Season is out and it's really great. I bought the 12" vinyl version that does the beautiful photograph on the cover more right than does the 12 cm CD. I don't typically use such an iconic image as a record sleeve, as a source to draw from but this time I wanted to make an exception. I don't recall ever painting on a 12" x 12" surface but it surely makes sense as it mimics the format of the LP.  Thus here is an adaption of the LP cover of Sugaring Season, same size, sans the title and name, but with my trademark backyard background. And the portrait, as always, is done freehand without any mechanical devices. The more realistic and true to the source material the painting is, the more important this issue is to me because all the character of the portrait in the painting hinges on small subtleties and distortions from the photographic original. In my self taught course psychology 101 I learned that involuntary distortions in reproduction tell a lot about some unconscious hidden aspects of one's psyche. So I'll add more and more material to be analyzed if someday anyone out there would have an interest. (Which most likely will be my psychiatrist after I've yet completed another thousand more of such paintings.) For the first couple of the next thousand paintings I'll stick to the 12 inch square format in order to produce some more record sleeve adaptations. The next Beth Orton song after the already discussed Something More Beautiful in the Top 100 2012 from Sugaring Season is the opening song Magpie. The song has a reference to a crow in it, which is precisely the animal I attributed to Beth Orton when, two years ago, I asked myself the question: "If Beth Orton would be asked what kind of animal she'd be, what would she answer?"