The wave is cresting

I'm fast approaching the halfway point. I had planned to be there by the end of the month, but it looks like the end of the first week of March. Even though I have more than half of the 38 individuals completed, there's still the counter images and the background to consider. There are nine faces that I need to finish before I will allow myself to say that I'm halfway and the one below is only the third. I have to go to the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte on Thursday and Friday for another session of the Innovation Institute and hope to have another 5 completed and posted by then. 

I have a steady stream of visitors coming by the studio these days. In keeping with my open door policy, they stop by to monitor the progress and tell others which leads to more visitors. I'm happy to share with them what I am working on and needless to say, I think they are more excited about seeing this finished than I am. I'm growing more and more attached to this piece and dread the day that I have to part with it. My good friend Tony Bell is a teacher at the Art Institute of Charleston and brought his entire class in on Tuesday. They were covering the topic of depth of field in photography and art and he wanted them to talk with me about ways visual artists use perspective and other techniques to create visual depth in their paintings. They were quiet at first but soon opened up and we had a great time. 

Today's image is that of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper.  

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was a civil and women's rights pioneer. She was one of the earliest black women activists in the realm of higher education. She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, the daughter of a slave, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and her white master, George Washington Haywood.

She showed great academic prom­ise from an early age, receiving a scholarship at age nine to attend St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute; in 1877 she married an instructor at the school, George Cooper. She was widowed in 1879 and never remarried. Cooper entered Oberlin in 1881, where she earned a B.A. in 1884 and an M.A. in mathematics in 1887.

She delivered her paper "The Negro Problem in America" at the Pan-African Conference in Lon­don in 1900 and was subsequently named to the Pan-African Execu­tive Committee. She did graduate work at the Sorbonne, in Paris, during 1911-12 and at Columbia in 1913-16. She received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in 1925. Dr. Cooper taught, or served as principal, at Dunbar High School (formerly M Street High), long the only aca­demic high school for blacks in Washington, D.C., for thirty-nine years. She died in 1964, in her life spanning ante-bellum slavery to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.