A great flame follows a little spark.
—Dante
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Below is a posting from several years back that is about one of my earliest attempts at painting, about 25 years back. While I am not particularly proud of the piece itself, it still has great meaning for me. I find that by revisiting it periodically gives me a glimpse of the motivations, excitement and energies that propelled me in those early days. Unfortunately, those things that get pushed aside by habit and acquired skill over time. Trying to remember what my younger self was seeing and experiencing brings those things back, if only for a short time.
I was looking through some old work, pieces that came from my earliest forays into painting about twenty years ago when I was just beginning to experiment. I came across this particular piece and stopped as I always do when I am meandering through the old work and this painting appears before me. It is one of my earliest efforts, done in late 1993. It is rough and doesn’t exactly represent where my work has went in the meantime. I was hesitant in showing it here but felt that there was something important in it for me.
This painting, copied in part from another artist’s watercolor, was done with old air brush paints on very cheap watercolor paper. As I said, it’s rough and not a piece for which I hold a lot of pride. Nor is it a piece that shows any level of mastery. Certainly not a piece that I want many people to see if they are not already familiar with my work from the decades beyond this. You seldom want to show something that displays a weakness but sometimes there is something of value that goes beyond the surface.
But for me there is something about this piece that propelled me forward, something that gave me some sort of insight into where I might want to go with this whole thing. I equate it to walking along and suddenly stumbling for what seems no reason. You stop and look down to see what made you trip and there is nothing but a tiny pebble. Insignificant in every way. Certainly nothing that would make you stop at any other time. But this time it has somehow caused you to loose your balance. So you stop and stand there, looking down at this pebble. In the moment, you begin to see other things that you had never taken notice of before and the path you had been walking before the pebble waylaid you is forgotten.
And that’s what this painting was and is for me– a pebble. On it’s own it is very little and completely innocuous. But for me it that thing that tripped me and made me stop to take notice of a new path. There were small inklings– the curves of the landscape and the blocking of the colors, for example– in this this piece that sparked thoughts and further explorations that, in turn, pushed me even more as I went forward.
In a very long chain of mostly fortunate reactions, this was the catalyst. So while I may not hold this painting in high esteem (nor would I expect anyone to do so) this old work has real meaning for me.
Redtree Times 