This is a very new painting, a 24″ by 30 canvas that I call Only Now. I fee lthat this is a piece that very much is representative of my larger body of work. It has my easily recognizable Red Tree, fields of deep colors in the foreground and the white of the gesso underneath breaking through the paint above to create trails and the far horizon.
But it also carries, at least in how I view it, the emotional tone that I think best represents my work. A sense of being calmly in the moment, taking in the stillness of the paused now. That sense of being in the now is from where the title emerges. I see the tree personified as being paused and taking the richness of all that is around it at the moment, not spending too much time worrying about what is in the future, represented here by the paler distant fields and hills at the horizon, or the past, which is somewhere back along the white trail that breaks into the lower portion of the picture plane.
No past or future in that instance, only the now.
I think the cool clarity of the color here, particularly in the graded tones of the sky, really gives this piece a sense of the ethereal that really enhances the message of the now. Looking at this painting as it rests on the easel now, it takes me far away to a palce of great inner calm. It’s not a feeling that I often sense in my own life. Probably most of us don’t feel that often enough. But this piece seems to give me a sort of roadmap to this place of calm. Or at least it gives me the knowledge that it can exist, if only in the mind.
And that is all I can ask.
Redtree Times 