Sometimes I am a little hesitant in showing certain paintings here on the blog. Sometimes their photographed images just don’t fully convey the impact or depth of the work.
Take the painting shown above for an example. Titled The Animating Presence, it produces a strong initial impact with its large size– 20″ by 60″ on canvas— and its deep colors and textures. The photo captures the colors (although not the depth within the colors) and a mere fraction of the texture but the power in its size is lost on the smaller screen. It is still a strong image but most people would be surprised at how truly different the actual painting comes across in person.
I showed this painting here a few months back in an early stage, shown now at the bottom. The landscape was laid out in the red oxide paint I use for my underpainting and the sky with its first several layers of color, the emotional atmosphere of the piece beginning to take shape. Many, many more layers produced the sky as it now looks above. There are layers that are almost completely obscured, perhaps with only a tiny glimmer of it coming through here and there. Looking at it, you may not be aware of it but its presence is vital to me, giving the whole thing the depth and life force that I seek in it.
And maybe that last sentence is a good way of explaining the title, The Animating Presence. The more I worked on this piece, the more I began to feel as though the Red Tree was in some sort of communion with a greater power in this painting, represented by the light breaking over the horizon.
This is always a hard thing to explain for me. As I have explained in the past, I was not brought up with religion of any sort. I was never indoctrinated in any sort of system of faith, never led to have either belief or disbelief. I was just here, neither a believer or an atheist. But looking at the world I had a sense that there was something more, some unseen source of power that sparked all life and consciousness. It wasn’t a benevolent god sitting on a throne in some heaven pulling the strings on human events and listening to our prayers. No, it was more a matter of physics and light and energy, an unseen force that permeated everything– an animating presence.
Now, a couple of hundred words can’t really sum up the whole of what I am describing or even what I see in this painting. But it is this struggle to come to terms with this idea of that presence that I see in this painting. That like those unseen layers of paint in the sky which give depth to the painting, one’s life is given meaning by an unseen force that we may never fully know or understand.
You can see this painting at the Principle Gallery at my Native Voice show,
Redtree Times 