To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
–Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
In some of my very earliest attempts at painting I used photo references, something I never use now. The photo that these two early pieces are based on was taken soon after I began painting in early 1994. It is of an abandoned place just a short distance up the road from us and is so overgrown now that you can barely see the structures from the road.
I don’t know why this scene intrigued me at the time. Maybe it was the geometry of the buildings and the tree. Maybe it was its state of decay. I don’t know. I just wanted something to paint, something to work on forms and colors and at that point I wasn’t yet sure of working completely from my own inner landscape. For some ridiculous reason, I think I still thought I had to work solely from life.
The bottom image was painted first and reflects the late winter of that year. The snow is gone and the maple tree next to the house is bare with the grasses around it shades of brown, not yet greened. It is painted in a more traditional watercolor style. Not very well painted actually. But I can see that I was beginning to make more complex colors. Still a long way to go but it did what I needed it to do at the time.
The top image was painted from the same photo but a few months later. I like this piece more than the earlier version. While it is still not a great piece of work, it shows considerable movement toward my individualized style. It is much more pleasing to my current eyes and those are the ones I trust. My eyes in ten years might beg to differ. But as it is now, I wouldn’t be ashamed to hang this one in my studio, even if it serves as reminder of what was in light of the what is.
There is a lot more expression in this piece, more freedom. I took artistic liberty in putting in the tree’s foliage and used a black crayon to outline it and the hill behind the house. I think I was using a spray bottle at the time to create the splatters on the grasses in the foreground.
Makes me chuckle a bit. I was experimenting with a lot of different techniques at the time like my spray bottle, scraping, masking with both fluid masks and tape, and some I am sure I have completely forgotten. I am not discounting those techniques but after a while, I just came to the conclusion that they weren’t for me, that in some ways they detracted from what I was attempting to do.
But again, they did what I needed them to do at the time. These experiments were vital steps forward. They showed me what worked and what did not. They gave me glimpses of the next step in my growth, providing just enough inspiration to move forward. My progress was fast but that was because I worked at it obsessively, moving from one needed step to the next.
There are still lessons to be learned. They come further apart now. I work slower and with an excitement that is more subtle. Even so, something new comes to light on a pretty regular basis that seems to change my work in some small way.
Thank goodness for that.
Here’s a song that I had never heard until this morning. I am a little out of the loop on much newer music, though this one is 13 or 14 years old. Getting better but still miss a lot. This song is Keep Your Head Up from English singer/songwriter Ben Howard. This video for this song has 37 million views. Like I said, I miss a lot of stuff. There is also a fine acoustic version that you might want to check out if you like the song.
And now, as if you didn’t know, it is time for you to git…