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.
Redtree Times 