Friday:  There is a convention in painting about “lost” and “found” edges.   What is meant by that is the degree to which there are distinct edges within a painting.  The painting world spans the full gamut of both extremes from totally found to happily lost.

On the one hand, “magic realism” finds every edge of every object, the result being something which is called “photo realism (although a photo doesn’t necessarily define everything in its field).  The success of the style depends upon an absolutely mastery of the medium.   My favourite magic realist is Tom Forrestal, whose imaginative frame shapes supply the creative pop; photo realism too often feels stiff because every detail is equally important.  Juicy colour is another antidote frequently present in magic realism.

The other end of the lost and found spectrum would show everything indistinctly, the Impressionists being famous explorers of the lost edge.  Some critics praise the technique as more “painterly” than photo realism because, I suppose, it leaves more room for the imagination.  That we have to view the such paintings like Monet's waterlilies from a certain distance also gestures towards the mysterious.

As usual, I am somewhat in the middle.  I consider myself to be a realist, simply because I don’t think you can improve on reality.  We live in a beautiful world and for me, art’s job is to recognize and celebrate that.  But I also want the viewer to join me in exploring, so frequently I will detail focal areas and use lost edges to suggest rather than show the background.  When it works, you get the impression of seeing something in its setting the way the eye would see it:  we focus on what interests us and the rest of our visual field remains fuzzy.

​As far as this painting is concerned,  my obvious interest  is in the extraordinary effects of light on these two flower heads.  Their colour is intense but varied and demanded multiple layers of glazing.  They are set in a dark background but I assume they are lit from above and are growing in a garden, although for the life of me I can’t remember where.   To suggest their placement, I have only laid in some neutralized green for the foliage but before the painting is finished, there will be light touches of brighter green and some hard edges.

Monday:  Mea culpa.  I haven't be able to bring myself to finish the painting, lost edges or not, because something was bothering me.  Artists always look to establish the light source and this one didn't make sense, no matter how I rotated the painting. Finally, a eureka moment  -- I recognized a indistinct fragment of the hot water radiator (to my credit, I had already decided that it couldn't be a fence....);  the reference photo was taken in our kitchen in front of the northwest window!  Probably sitting in a glass of water on the counter, the flowers were decidedly not growing , nor was the light coming from above.   I had to have taken the shot late in the day, sometime in spring before the canopy opened.  The dazzling sunlight was entering instead at a low angle, backlighting the flowerhead below to the left!  Gravity reigns again!  

Dang.  Back to the drawing board to re-think that background.  At least it now the image is right side up!  Let's agree that I painted it in Australia.
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Weebly, my favourite web host , informs me that this post is my 300th.  No wonder I’m starting to repeat myself.

That said, you might still wonder why a painter would ever feel the need to be a writer.    Like images, ideas dance in my mind and it has been just plain fun to lassoo them for a closer look. I don’t aim for profundity, just commonality.  We are all far more alike than different.  So are writing and painting.

So thanks for having dropped in!  Those who have been along for the full ride will be receiving their Marathon badge in the mail.  

See you next Monday.

P.S. This is my current dance partner.  We are at the “starting-to-get-serious” stage.

Jon mused today that I am the only person he has ever heard of who crashed a book club.  Well, I felt honoured to be invited as a guest, particularly because they were discussing a demanding novel by one of my favourite writers, Timothy Findley.  It was Pilgrim, suitably the only Findley that I had not happily finished, and the invitation (Are you reading this, Darling?) provided a great opportunity to persevere and then talk about it with other avid readers.

I rarely do a close reading any more,  opting, I guess, for quantity over quality.  Pilgrim was suitably dense and rewarding.  I made notes, wrote pencilled marginalia (happening to own a copy) and puzzled over the hints.  If the novel proved disappointing, it was only because the last fifty pages were almost unnecessary, having proved possible to predict.  That said, Pilgrim left me thinking about big ideas, as Findley always does.

If I had to pinpoint the idea, it would something like this:  “Because human history - past present and future - is filled with suffering, it is the responsibility of art to alleviate pain and in fact to try to change its root cause — our human “bloody-mindedness.”  In the novel, Pilgrim, a mysterious immortal, is wracked with memories of horrendous and avoidable suffering like the mass starvations in medieval Europe driven by greed.  Findley is crystal clear about art’s spectacular failure to inspire less selfish behaviour before 1912, when the novel is set, and Pilgrim’s prophetic dreams predict even worse to come, the reader understanding that he is foreseeing World War 1.

For Findley, hope resides in our capacity for a spiritual understanding of the interconnection of all life.    Intuition of inclusivity is our gateway to redemption.  

As the novel ends, Pilgrim throws the gauntlet to modern heirs of the shamanistic practitioners — artists.
In fact, Political Art seems extra big these days; this year it is primarily about #Me Too.  But Findley suggests that art is always political, a thought that forced me to wonder about the worth of what I do.  I concluded that my own work hopes to remind us that paradise still exists and that what remains of it must never be sacrificed to bloody-mindedness.  That translates to :  be very very careful whom you vote for.

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It was one of those perfect summer weekends – blue skies and endless shades of green, so we headed for the river.  But don't assume that just because Jon and Theodore and I travelled in the same canoe, we were on the same river. 

For Jon, everything important happens in the water.  He has memorized our river’s many turns, often standing to stern the canoe while delivering a running commentary on all creatures for whom the river is home.  He is the first one  to see the beaver quietly slipping back in, the solitary brown trout ducking into cover or a crowd scene of young crayfish scatter when they sense a shadow.

Theodore, who barely peeks over the gunnel, has slowly begun to enjoy paddling.  Mind you, he didn’t have Jewell’s advantages. If you remember,  she had been carefully introduced to the canoe because she was a lady;  we pulled it up onto the shore one morning and began by filling it with cushions and books;  Jon and I climbed in, and spent the day reading while she waited suspiciously outside on the grass. The next day, she climbed in and we spent the day as before.  But the day after that, we launched the canoe and forever after that, Jewell ran to the boathouse when she heard the word “paddle.”   Not that she did, of course.  In deference to his gender, Theodore (being a boy’s boy) was simply placed in the canoe and off we went. When he showed his displeasure by jumping out we simply paddled away and let him back into the canoe a hundred yards down river.  Naturally, he doesn’t contribute to the paddling either.  He contents himself with reprising Jewell’s Queen of the Nile role, simply sitting in the royal barge like a monarch and waving to the odd duck.  ​

My role in this weird threesome trio is a heck of a lot more demanding.  While taking photos to paint in the winter, bow paddling and watching for rocks, I remain in charge of all  fauna above the surface.  Yes, it is an unfair burden.  Thank you for noticing.  But I was the one who spotted a gleaming green heron, caught a glimpse of a merganser skimming along the surface, and had a good look at turk’s-cap lilies in full bloom.  And who didn’t show up but my beloved “Ancient #2,” and the perfect maple “On the Bend!”  It was like Old Home Week.

Some days couldn’t be more perfect if they tried.  This one certainly didn't have to.