Suspending Reality
And stepping through the green curtain
black & white detail of work in progress
I’m getting close to a significant breakthrough in this current painting. But of course, it’s making me question everything in my previous three. To my painter friends out there, I’m assuming this is a relatable phenomenon?
However, maybe there will be a through line, and it will all make sense when the series is complete. I’m not sure. I’ve not really done this before to be honest. I mean to say, I’ve never created a large landscape series of paintings before with the intention of showing them in a gallery setting. But that is the dream! And I can feel the synapses connecting the pieces. My brain is buzzing with electricity! My heart is thumping to the music and my inner circuitry!
I just hope I don’t screw it up.
I’m trying hard to pay attention to my body as well as my mind. I’m taking a step away to think it through when I get stuck, and not just blunder on ahead. I’m noticing when I begin to get weary and make sure to take breaks to observe or do something else. During the underpainting process I’m constantly thinking about value, light and shadow as well as layout and accuracy. Once the sketch is complete, I start to think about color, style, transparency (although I also think about transparency in the under-layers) and I am thinking several steps into the future. What is the final aesthetic goal? What is the feeling I’d like to achieve?
In this particular painting I’m attempting to capture childhood nostalgia with the presence a childlike figure and his dog within a lush landscape. I start with a traditional and realistic approach to the drawing and use a very limited color palette. My inspiration for this piece is Neil Welliver’s “Two Boys in a Canoe” with lots of greens applied in a simple wash. I then pull out details with muted tonal variations and plenty of texture, a variety of different brush strokes, and many layers of transparency.
This painting is pretty big at 40x30 inches, and let me tell you, a large painting is something you need to work your way up to if you’re typically a small-scale painter. My children’s book style illustrations are small- most are about 10x10- and so I needed to get warmed up for this kind of shift, which took about a year to get acclimated to the change.
The scale is needed to communicate the big feelings I have for the current state of the world. The end goal is to create a contemporary painting sketched in the classic tradition that comments on our collective retreat from nature in this modern time, and how it’s hurting us.
Can we avoid climate disaster? Can a broken society do the right thing and right this ship? Within the painting, there is a suggestion that this is possible. Perhaps it invites you to remember a time when you felt closer to nature. The child is also ghost-like, and maybe that means something, too, about our own loss of innocence.
As per usual, the viewer can take what they want from it. As for myself, I keep returning to unanswered questions. I find myself trying to set down these anxieties, but then unconsciously I pick them up. Maybe the respite in this painting is actually for the artist! Unless it gets into a show that will surely be the case, but that’s a different concern for another day.
Timelapse of underpainting process.
