David Prashker's Art Gallery

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Hannah in a Mirror

Three weeks travelling through Central America together, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica; hours upon hours where she sat in the front seat, because car sickness is less that way, and I in the back, talking to her in semophore through the reflections in the wing-mirror. It became symbolic of the journey, and I was determined to capture the image for all time; only cameras wobble when you're driving over pot-holes and the mountain tracks through rain-forests, so it would have to be in paint, and wait till I got home.

It proved to be the most technically challenging picture I have ever undertaken. Hundreds of hours, to make sure of every pixel, dotted at 800% magnification like one of those mediaeval miniaturists, digital pointillisme... I had a printer download it to cork-board and gave it to her as a birthday present, three full years after the event.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Eat Your Heart Out, Andy Warhol

This is a cheat. Take a photo of yourself, upload it to any one of several free software programmes that are on-line, and they will make it like this for you.

Ready-made Art!

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Face 199a

Face 198a was responsible for this. As recounted on that page (click here), but I don't need to re-tell it here... there was her, and the books, and the hot chocolate (at a Barnes & Noble in America you absolutely have to drink their hot chocolate, not their coffee), and me sketching, and then that cliff-hanger moment in my tale: "when the man she was really looking for arrived, with mocha frappuccino and a stale almond croissant". Ah but the look on his face, when he saw her, looking at me, and me, looking at her, and...

There is an entire series of pictures of eyes that resulted from this, but you will have to wait for me to post them.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

Darfur

Somebody's photograph, found in a newspaper, copied as a sketch, then painted - if I could I would tell you the name of the photograher, and say thank you.

Somebody's life, lived in a refugee camp, very sketchy, greyer than I have painted it - if I could I would tell you the name of the person, and say sorry on all our behalves (not even halves; our 2.5 per cents, which is about the most of GDP we ever give to help these starving fellow-humans, while making several more than that per cent back in GNP out of their exploitation)

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Crucifixion (2)

My first attempt at a crucifixion, though clearly others had done the job before me, in Life as well as Art, so the number 2 in parenthesis seemed only appropriate when I couldn't work out how to make the symbol for infinity on my computer.

The objective was to describe the journey of evolution, from algae among the sea-weed, through apes on the shoreline, to Perfected Man, but somehow Imperfect Man got in the way, and it ended up as this, all wilderness and tortured, murdered bodies. An Immaculate Conception, but alas not even an Immaculate Failure.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Face 1b

To assist the blogger in creating a blog in an organised manner, the designers create a widget called "labels", and you can name them yourself, and even place a page under more than one label. So, for this blog, I have separated the pieces into "Abstracts" and "Drawings", "Pictures" and "Portraits", with separate labels for specific series such as "The Artist Was Bored", "The Digital Art Gallery", and a label of their own for the "Cartoons" and the "Sketchbooks". All very useful to the librarian and the museum archivist, as it is to the tourist.

Shall I then confess that I hate these labels? My copy of Dostoievski's "The Brothers Karamazov" is not on my bookshelf alongside Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels, even though both are murder mysteries; nor is it on my Russian shelf, which is mostly 20th century, but does include Pushkin and Tolstoy, as well as a critique of the early paintings of Modigliani (the critic was an American, but he wrote the book in his native Russian and then translated it into American English; Vladimir Nabokov, by name); the Dostoievski is next to Camus, Herman Melville, Kazantsakis and Nietzsche, on my Philosophy shelf, though Sartre is not there, because he is in my French Literature section, as is Victor Serge, though Serge is actually Russian (and yes, you are correct, I often have difficulty locating particular books).

Where do I place Face 1b then, in the labeling of this blog? It is not a portrait - I made up the face entirely from my imagination, though it is perfectly possible that a woman who looks exactly like this exists somewhere in the world, and maybe I saw her, and the image embedded itself in my psyche. But it was not painted as a portrait: it was doodled in a meeting when I was, as usual, bored: plain white paper, odd shapes in odd colours, random, abstract, coloured in. At some point it began to look like a face, so I let it; and then, later, scanned it, gave it a black background, finished it, named it. So is it an "Abstract", a "Drawing", a "Picture" or a "Portrait"? Does it count as "The Artist Was Bored" even though it is not modeled on someone else's work, like all the others in that series? And is not everything in this gallery "Digital Art"? I have placed it in "Portraits", only because that is where most people looking would expect it to be placed, though in fact a "Portrait" is the one thing that it most definitely is not.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/