Sketch for Powwow

Powwow Culture is a dream cover, that is to say, a cover that appeared in a dream, arising spontaneously. The difficulty with spontaneous dream images is that bringing them into the waking world is the reverse of quick. Especially with painting, it can be slow. In fact, it took me around a year to even find a way of making the face. That's not even discussing the slowness of the medium of oil paint.

For Powwow culture I needed alluring eyes, especially since there are six of them. The icon that I dreamed of was a man, but the eyes were dark. Some time later I was reading an article about the now un-sung singer Al Jolson in The Saturday Book, my favorite anthology of quirky culture, and it hit me: his were the eyes I needed. The stars of that time were made up dark for the silent film age.

After I had the eyes, it was only to find hairstyles of the 70s/80s, Farrah Fawcett being the innovator for the strange unisex style of the time. At first I wanted to find year book photos of my contemporaries, but these can be actually be surprisingly difficult to find on the web, and I have no old year books, long jettisoned in my many moves. So I went to the source to find a variety of Farrah hair.

Then it was only to do some photoshop work, and I came up with this image, which is reasonably close to a mythic hero personality, a man by the name of Darrell LaFontain. As to he he is, I am not sure quite at this point.