I am writing this mainly to give my back a rest but also to tease out the meaning of a word which the current occupant of my easel keeps muttering: “Gesture.”
A particularly rude gesture comes to mind first as this baby seems intent on being delivered feet first. This morning alone I finally gave up looking for the 2010 reference photo I had just yesterday and cobbled together a second one: this 40 x 30 landscape does not plan on giving me a break. (Think squirrels loose in your house).
Sure, it’s my own fault. The photos which beckon me are frequently way too complex for my little brain box. The reference photo was taken from the Burnhamthorpe Bridge looking downriver in late December, 2010. You might remember my training close friends to repeat: “Don’t ever paint another violin again’” and suchlike. And if I’ve had twelve years to talk myself back from the edge, why am I here?
Beauty may be ridiculously elusive , even undefinable. But seductive. When you fall, you fall.
Like a marriage, a painting is a commitment which once begun is worth full commitment. "I did" touch paint to canvas. And darn it, here I am again, perhaps not steeped in blood like Macbeth but certainly like Julius Caesar, mid-thigh in the Rubicon.
Finally getting to the point, I’m still mired in the value study component of the underpainting, and beginning to tackle the whitened wispy trees which attracted me so. Last week I read somewhere that it’s important to capture a tree’s “gesture.” You normally hear this word describing a loose quick figurative drawing of a model, aiming for both the pose and its essential feeling or movement, perhaps. So what tree “gesture” am I looking for? For one, it is the lacy hoarfrost on the forest.
One lives in hope.
A particularly rude gesture comes to mind first as this baby seems intent on being delivered feet first. This morning alone I finally gave up looking for the 2010 reference photo I had just yesterday and cobbled together a second one: this 40 x 30 landscape does not plan on giving me a break. (Think squirrels loose in your house).
Sure, it’s my own fault. The photos which beckon me are frequently way too complex for my little brain box. The reference photo was taken from the Burnhamthorpe Bridge looking downriver in late December, 2010. You might remember my training close friends to repeat: “Don’t ever paint another violin again’” and suchlike. And if I’ve had twelve years to talk myself back from the edge, why am I here?
Beauty may be ridiculously elusive , even undefinable. But seductive. When you fall, you fall.
Like a marriage, a painting is a commitment which once begun is worth full commitment. "I did" touch paint to canvas. And darn it, here I am again, perhaps not steeped in blood like Macbeth but certainly like Julius Caesar, mid-thigh in the Rubicon.
Finally getting to the point, I’m still mired in the value study component of the underpainting, and beginning to tackle the whitened wispy trees which attracted me so. Last week I read somewhere that it’s important to capture a tree’s “gesture.” You normally hear this word describing a loose quick figurative drawing of a model, aiming for both the pose and its essential feeling or movement, perhaps. So what tree “gesture” am I looking for? For one, it is the lacy hoarfrost on the forest.
One lives in hope.
"Above the Credit" #4 oil, 30 x 40
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