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Posts Tagged ‘Sailboats’

Setting Course

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 22, 2025| 1 Comment »

Setting Course— Headed to Principle Gallery, June 2025

Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started.

–Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I am not sure that the passage above from Stephen Hawking is perfect for what I am seeing in this new painting but for this morning it will do just fine. The painting, headed to the Principle Gallery for my June show there, is titled Setting Course and is 24″ by 24″ on canvas.

Though from its outward appearance the sailboat here seems to imply setting a course to some distant destination, that is not necessarily how I read it for myself. As it is with much of my work, I see all journeying and searching not as being outward but rather inward.

The answers we think can only be found by seeking outside ourselves are often contained within. Often it is the contrasting and gained experience we find on the outward journey that provides the clarity to recognize the answers within. We find that we didn’t know what we thought we knew, didn’t want what we thought we wanted, weren’t what we thought we were, and so on.

We may voyage around the world but it usually ends, as Hawking points out, with us coming back to where we started– the destination within ourselves.

I see this painting and its interwoven nature of the inward and outward as another form of the Entanglement that is the theme for this year’s exhibit. We are contained in everything and, as a result, become the destination for our every journey.

Every course we set leads back to us.

Okay, my head hurts a little now. Maybe I should have just said that I like this painting simply because I deeply feel its colors and forms and that the boat here makes me think of living a conscious life of self-reliance and self-determination.

Maybe even that is too much to say.

How about I just say that there’s something speaks to me, and I hope it says something to you as well?

Kind of a long journey to get back to that, right?

Like the boat here, I am moving on this morning. Here’s a favorite song whose mood   and title feels right for this painting. Plus it feels like perfect fit for a cool, rainy May morning with lots of those same blues and greens outside the window here in the studio. This is Blue in Green from Miles Davis.

Setting Course is included in my exhibit of new work, Entanglement, that opens Friday, June 13 at the Principle Gallery with an Opening Reception from 6-8:30 PM. I will also be giving a Painting Demonstration at the gallery on the following day, Saturday, June 14, from 11 AM until 1 PM.

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Transformation

Posted in Painting, Process, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , , on May 13, 2019| 2 Comments »

Sometimes I start paintings and somewhere along the way the piece loses its momentum. Or I lose the thread that was initially carrying me along when I started  or I just lose interest in it. The piece above on the left (sorry for the poor image!) might well be an example of all three of these things.

I started this piece a couple of years back and it seemed to just run into a brick wall. I felt like I had painted myself into a corner and didn’t see it going anywhere forward. There was a lot that I like in it. The sky, for instance, and the color of the field. But the way they came together didn’t speak to me and I felt like doing anymore would render an acceptable painting but that would be about it– acceptable.

And who wants to just do acceptable work? That’s not much of an aspiration, especially when so much of my work depends on creating my own interest and excitement in the work.

I thought there should be more to this painting than what it was showing but just couldn’t see it. So it sat. And sat and sat for month after month. I would pick it up periodically and examine it but it still had nothing to say to me as it was. It was irritating.

Then the other day I decided I was going to simply paint over it. Black it out of existence. It wouldn’t bug me anymore, at least. But the idea of blacking it out made me think about altering the whole idea of the painting. Maybe I could save that sky and incorporate it into something different.

So it moved from a landscape to a seascape. And it seems to have worked as I am pleased with the result thus far.

There is a sense of the scale and power of open water in this piece, maybe more than I have portrayed in past similarly themed paintings. I am not a sailor in any way, never been on a small boat out of sight of land but that feeling of the immensity of the ocean is one that I can easily imagine. There must be both a thrill and a terror in it. And that’s what I am getting– fear and exhilaration– from this piece as the small sailboat teeters on on the curl of a large wave.

That dichotomy of emotion, the yin/yang thing of fear and exhilaration in this case, is something often try to find in my work. And it seems to be strong here. So, maybe the years that piece spent being shuffled around my studio before its transformation were worth it.

I’ll be looking at this one for a bit longer…

 

 

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