This new painting, titled Ahead of the Curve, is a 20″ by 24″ canvas headed in the next few days out to Erie for inclusion in Alchemy, my solo exhibit opening a week from today at the Kada Gallery. This was one of those paintings that comes quickly at first then is sat aside for quite a long time before I go back at it. In some of these pieces, it’s because I just don’t see a way forward in it and don’t want to act before I have some inner direction, some small sense of destination to follow so that the lifeforce I see in it isn’t squandered.
On others, I reach a point where I see all sorts of possibilities in moving forward and can’t decide which way to move. I become paralyzed. Such was the case with this painting. I built this from the bottom, as I often do, and had allowed the multi-colored mound of fields to grow. I loved the color and curve of it and the way the smaller green mound jutted upward into the blank canvas. I thought it was beautiful at that point, with no trees or sky or sun — just a mound with a forked road against a white surface.
So it sat for a few months and I would look at it every day, one day seeing it juxtaposed against a deep and receding field. The next time I looked I saw I saw it looking down on mountain tops. But it was the curve of the mound that spoke to me and directed me. I wanted to create some depth, to move the viewer past the mound and into the scene itself but not so deep that the mound and the Red Tree that would adorn it would be just looked past.
I began to see a slightly lighter curved field with a road continuing through it, creating a closer curved horizon. The greenish trees on the curved horizon appeared like the hands on a clock to me, somehow representing the passage of time and I saw a sun or moon on that horizon so that the tree would be above it, as though it were ahead of the sun’s advance. The Red Tree here is not reactive, bowing to the circumstances the world puts before it. No, it is proactive, creating its own stance and its own reaction from the world. It is indeed ahead of the curve.
I think that’s what this is all about, the idea of being proactive in carrying out and maintaining one’s own vision of their world. Trusting that the sometimes invisible things that they see can be made visible to others. That might be the definition of a visionary or a fool. That’s the thing about being ahead of the curve– you may not be around to see which is true.
Redtree Times 