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After years of painting, I am happy, grateful, and excited to paint every day. There are many ways to measure success—for me is to paint as much as I can.

My yardstick for measuring success is the square footage of painting surface that I covered with oil paint.

Life can be perceived simple when looking at a simple painting like this one, but surrounding this is a ‘complex’ election year. There are many important topics that are being weighed: the border control, guns, wars, the legality of abortion, truth and lies.

Oil on Canvas, 30 inches x 20 inches

This world would have been a boring place if nobody bother to create music, paint beautiful things, or dance to songs.

The following color study was completed about 10 days ago, in preparation for the final painting above.

Here is the same portrait after about 2 days, roughly 6 hours, of painting from a live model. This is one of My favorite stage of any portrait sitting—everything is super loose, I am not committed to anything, but just seeing and painting.

And, then follows a slower—but lovely—stage of looking and painting until the portrait is completed, or the time with the model ends.

This is a painting of a candy seller and her daughter, but their faces are a collection of many portraits.

Sometime ago, there were only a few migrants with young children wrapped around on their backs, selling candy from one New York City subway station to another. Then, the migrants arrived in thousands. Just in 2023, more than 100,000 migrants have arrived in New York City, and more to other cities. Unable to find legitimate work, migrants are struggling. 

Why did they leave everything behind and crossed the southern border? Faced with undeniable danger or the fantasies of utopia hidden beneath the complicated U.S. policies and politics, migrants have risked everything and traveled the dangerous path to cross the U.S. southern border. 

Today, securing the U.S. border is prioritized among other world crises. Many Americans don’t agree on securing the border. Some welcome the migrants, some don’t. Caught between these two ideas are real people who have become political pawns as the 2024 presidential election looms.

Related Reading, Links and Resources

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection
• NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs
• Opposition to Immigration – Wikipedia
• Helpful Links for Families of English Language Learners
• Why are we so afraid of when it comes to Immigration?
• New York Immigration Coalition
• Americans are increasingly worried about immigration and national identity, poll shows
• International Organization for Migration (IOM)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Statistics

I have been painting bigger than ever this year. It’s one thing to painting something small and let it be cute and all, but I think when painting portraits, a painting brings a whole new feeling when it is life size.

I got around to finish 3 paintings today:

Portrait of Paul, which I had been working for the past 3 weeks. A painting for a competition that I had been working on for some time. And this portrait of Steve, which I worked on it after completing Paul’s Portrait.

I had initially painted the entire painting with raw umber, and I thought about stopping there, but with two 20 minute sessions remaining, I decided to put colors. The images shown were taken after each 20 minute sessions.