Portrait of Tabbetha McCale
Tabbetha was the girlfriend of my friend Mott-ly, and they lived together in his apartment. At the time that Mott was going to leave for Nebraska to have his leg amputated Tabbetha was planning a trip to England. I went over to their place the evening prior to the departure of either of them, mainly to study Tabbetha's features for this painting. (If you haven't figured out by now, I did all of my portraits from memory.)
Tabbetha at the time was into making voodoo doll sorts of things. Primitive looking dolls with wood block heads or something, often incorporating actual hair from a friend. I think that she and I shared the same obsession of using an "object of contagion" in our artworks. One that she had made represented Mott-ly to her and had his hair attached to the head. Anyway, those are the little things that are visible in this painting, although I wanted too give them some sense of being alive.