This last week I’ve been very distracted finding out about the life of my ancestor, Conde de Lipa, a captain, photographer and war refugee. I won’t go into detail here. You can read all about it in Spanish and English, and in bad Polish and French on his blog. Yes, dead people have blogs. However, I found the time to continue working on “Thinking of Basquiat”, which you can see in its two previous stages, Thinking of Basquiat I and Thinking of Basquiat II. By now, I was thinking of Conde de Lipa more than of Jean-Michel.

I found the time, but what I didn’t find was a white oil pastel stick. As you may recall from my previous post, I needed more white for this piece. I got some white, but it turned out not to be a Holbein oil pastel, but something more like conté crayon (the count rears his head again). I was disappointed not to have a white oil pastel stick, but my mind was already set up to continue working on this portrait. So, believe it or not, I managed to fix many of the problems by using a black oil pastel and the tiny crumbs of white oil pastel that I found in the box. When even those ran out, I scraped white from the background to use on the forehead, until there was no more white to be found anywhere. Is it finished? Perhaps. I can still see a few things I could work on, if I ever get any more white.