About My Profile Photo

Photo by Jeff Bellantuono

I've been thinking about digressing from the camera stuff a bit, so I thought I'd start here, although this comment still revolves around photography, art and imaging, but it's a start. My profile photo is, first of all not a profile, but rather a photograph of the back of my head. It was taken by a very good friend of mine as we were looking at paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery. The painting which I am gazing at is by the American artist, Philip Guston. I was explaining to my friend, Jeff, that Guston's later paintings such as the one we were observing were not as abstract as they might at first appear and that they often contained imagery, especially of people. As I was looking at this particular painting and discussing it at the same time I pointed out that the rather large dark area in the painting appeared to me to represent the back of someone's head. I said that based on what I've seen and read about this era of Guston's work it would not be surprising if that were the case. Jeff, being an artist himself and a rather clever and humorous one at that, decided to illustrate my point by photographing the back of my head along side of the painting. The relation is uncanny!