A Drawing for Pentimento

The penultimate drawing in my series, number 79 of 80, is for the poem "Pentimento." The original painting was done from life. Ann Bayard had posed for the preliminary sketch that became the painting for my color version of Moments in Light and Shadow. So I decided the easy thing to do would be to finish up this drawing and use it for the black and white version of the book.

Getting close to the end of my revisions, I did an overview of all the drawings for the book. I realized that the revised drawing I made of Ann would be more appropriate for the poem "Diamonds in Serpent Eyes," since I had added an image of a snake in the mirror.

But what to do, then, about an illustration for the poem "Pentimento," now a blank? The poem describes the phenomenon of a previous painting shining through an over painting, after years of wear. Pentimento is sometimes translated as "an artist’s regret." One could think of it as a ghost of the artist’s past coming back to haunt him.

My poem was written so long ago I had to read it over again to figure out what to do in order to represent it visually. In the poem, the image is of a man with his head turned. The ghostly re-emergence behind the man is a woman. The artist changed the position and gender of the model.

Searching through my old sketchbooks, I found a drawing of a man in the position described in the poem. So I lightly added an overlay in the shape of a female. Just for fun, to add to the gender bending experience, I made a poster on the wall of that famous photograph Marlene Dietrich dressed in a tuxedo.