At this time of the year I normally take a little time and revisit some of my work from the past. I am typically beginning to look ahead to the coming year and am looking for inspiration, hoping to find a new path to follow and examine. By starting with my own work first, I look for pieces from the past that have a singular look for the time in which they were created. Perhaps I was doing something at that time, experimenting with color or the manner in which I apply the paint for example, something that was set aside and never revisited. Perhaps, now would be a good time to revisit this path.
If I can find it.
The painting above is one example of what I’m talking about. Called Pride and Joy and painted in the first month or so of 2003, it is a 15.5″ by 16″ image on a wood panel. While it has the elements of the Red Roof series that was emerging at that time, it has a sky that is different from others of that time and not one that I have painted since. It has a golden glow in it that gives the whole piece a great warmth and shimmer.
I find it really appealing yet am somewhat baffled by how it was achieved. That’s one of the drawbacks in the way I paint. Being self-taught, my technique is always shifting, nudging in small degrees one way or the other by new discoveries or ingrained habits. I don’t have an anchor of taught technique that I work from. This was especially evident in my early work where you could see how the technique would sometimes have wide swings throughout a year.
In this case, could I recapture the look, the golden quality of that sky? I don’t know. But it does open up a path for me that I may want to follow for a while, hoping that it leads somewhere new and exciting. Maybe that path that I double back to will be one that I am now more ready to follow than I was a decade ago.
And that’s the purpose of looking back at this time of the year for me. I have a couple of more examples to show in the next few weeks that illustrate how there are paintings that were the start of paths that I have yet to fully follow. Stay tuned.
Redtree Times 