Visions and Revisions in My Studio

I've been very busy in my studio while the weather has been pleasant here.  The heat returns this week, and I have to get ready for the coming semester, so I won't be spending quite so much time there.
I'm doing one new painting (a canvas is stretched and ready for another new one), and revisiting a couple of older paintings, one from earlier this year.

I substantially repainted a lot of a painting from this spring called David's Dad, a painting about David Wojnarowicz's childhood, about his violent alcoholic monster of a father, and David finding refuge in the critters of small creeks and ponds.

These are all my photos.  The lighting conditions were not ideal, so I apologize for the quality.

Here is the current version:

Here is the painting in its former state this last spring:

As you can see, a lot has changed.  I completely repainted the figure of young David.  I just sanded out the old one and started over again.  I drastically repainted the middle ground getting rid of the cattails, pushing back the shoreline, and adding more illegal dumping.  I also repainted the trees in the background.  I repainted much of the foreground, mostly adding some critters and repainting others.


Some details from the painting in its current state:

David is holding a rough green snake.  He had a special fondness for green snakes.  They're very beautiful, and though common, are hard to find.  I made the snake look more like a snake and less like a worm in this version.

Here is the new painting, Hustled, about the occasions in David Wojnarowicz's younger years of hustling when he was drugged, beaten, raped and almost killed about 3 times.  He describes these episodes in Seven Miles A Second, his comic book autobiography, and especially in The Waterfront Journals where he tells about these events happening to someone else (though they really happened to him).  This painting is not quite finished and I expect that it will also go through some revisions.

Here are some details:

I did a little work on Krazy Kat Landscape, mostly trying to get the moon right.  That turned out to be more of a task than I anticipated, and I'm still not completely happy with it.