Earlier in the week at the dinner at which I was speaking I was asked why there were no windows or doors in my houses. I answered that I wanted them to be somewhat anonymous and that leaving the windows and doors out allowed the eye to glide easily over them to the focal point of the painting. I didn’t mention that I have painted houses and building with windows and doors, usually when the structure is a central figure in the composition. I wrote a blog entry several years ago about one such painting. In this essay I also mention how I came to paint clouds in the manner that I do, answering another question that I was recently asked. Even though the painting shown is long in the hands of that collector, here’s what I had to say:
This is a new painting that I’ve just finished, tentatively called As Clouds Roll By. It’s a 14″ by 18″ image painted on ragboard. It’s a composition that I have visited on a number of occasions, this time at the request of a collector in Pennsylvania, and one that I always get great pleasure from painting, savoring the subtle variations that make each piece unique .
Even though this is a very simple composition with few elements, the great satisfaction I feel after finishing a piece such as this is something I can’t fully explain. Perhaps it’s the recognition of the things in this piece that fully jibe with what I hope to achieve in my paintings. The simplicity of design. The quietude of vast open space. The depth into the picture, even though it is a very simple composition. The inviting warmth of the house and tree. The languorous fashion in which the clouds roll by, in a way representing the slow and inevitable march of time.
It clicks a lot of my own buttons.
The clouds in this piece always take me back to the first time I painted clouds in that looked like these. I was not yet a full-time painter and had obtained a large commisiion that would prove to be very important to me. I was on a short deadline and was still painting in the dining area of our home at the time with large sheets of paper spread over folding tables. I was working on a large triptych and was nearly finished when our late cat, Tinker, decided to explore the tables. Bounding up, she stepped first in a damp part of my palette and ran across the three sheets, leaving perfect little paw prints in a watery blue tint in her wake. As the echoes of my bellow faded, my mind raced as I looked at my now very unfinished work.
Start over? No time. Try to blend them in to the background? Not with this particular style of painting. I sat and looked, concentrating. Wait a minute. The prints only ran across the sky portion of all the sheets. And they ran in lovely diagonal manner.
Quickly, I was at it with paint and within several minutes I had blocked in clouds where once there were paw prints. It worked. Tinker’s run across the sky fit the rhythm of the piece and the clouds actually gave a fullness to the composition that it had lacked. It was actually quite an improvement.
So when I see clouds such as these, I always flash back to my initial panic and the subsequent discovery of good fortune in this happy accident. Since that day, when what seems to be a disastrous event happens with one of my paintings I step back with a much calmer mind and eye with the knowledge that perhaps this is just a new opportunity to see things a new way.
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Maybe I should call this new painting The Cheshire Cat Tree instead of The Moment of Decision, which is the title I gave to it. There is a sort of built-in grin in the curve of the lower path, as though it is all that remains after the Cheshire Cat has disappeared and the advice he offered Alice in the quote at the top seems to fit so well with anyone coming to any fork in the road. And the Red Tree offers only, like the Cheshire Cat, enigmatic advice and guidance at best for it knows that we alone are responsible for our decisions and the path that we will ultimately follow.
Redtree Times 