Findng much to say about a man in a dashiki

"Memories of My Home"

The model in our portrait drop-in session last week and today presented himself in South African native attire. His blue dashiki was in great contrast to the tone of his skin, and o his closely cropped hair, orange tinted. Last week I worked on developing his portrait, placing it deliberately to the left on the canvas...with no real idea of what would eventually fill the space centrally and to the right.

This past week my mind played with possibilities, as I explored, each evening, on my laptop. What came to the fore in my thinking were paintings I have done in the past that contain te right ingredients, as well as images of fabric from South Africa, and necklaces that men there would embellsh themselves with, often colorfully beaded.  also learned that sitter was wearing a "dashiki", a native South African garment.
The animals that seem to appear in his mind are from a painting I did as a commission several years ago. It was specifically about the wildlife in South Africa. So now I've collaged a reduced size image of thet work into this one. The woman and children also are characters I lifted from a series of paintings of mine that I developed, some years back, for a possible project , a proposal, for a hospital in Detroit. It made reference to the ethnic variety that comprised he clientele that frequented that  hospital. That was a goal of the design for that project. I had painted a few of the panels for the project on large canvases. Now I've borrowed part of those paintings to suggest the family of the man in the portrait, imagined, remembered, or outside of where he stands. AgainI hae resized the image to laceit in this work as a collage element. I enjoyed reusing my other paintings' elements at ths time.