If I’m lucky, somebody is feeding the waterfowl when I take my camera to the lakeshore.  I have my favourites, of course.  Ducks are to seagulls as skunks are to raccoons:  the politer cousins.  However this time there were no well-behaved ducks in sight, not even mallards, so I had to settle for the gulls, who, predictably shrieking and arguing, wheeled through the sky.  I set my camera for “sports” and hoped for the best.

This shot was a happy surprise for someone like me;  I am ham-handed with a camera.  We have a family joke that goes like this:  Did you see the shooting star?  No, where?    Did you see the fish jump?  No, where?  And so it goes.  Thus catching a seagull poised in the air came as somewhat of a surprise — a thrilling one, because the still point, her gimlet eye, is sharp, fixed on the edible target, while her wings are blurred with strength and purpose.  When I painted it this week, I realized that the image simply needed transfer, not adjustment:  it had a sharply detailed focal point within softened surroundings.  After all, it is the way our own eyes function, isn’t it?  Directing the viewer’s eye to the centre of interest is more easily said than done, but half of the fun of painting is problem-solving.  And once in a wonderful while, problems solve themselves (unlike the white-water canoeing photo which will need a complete reversal of soft and hard edges when I start it!).

The psychologist William James (Henry James' brother) said something interesting about the whole issue of focus:

"Millions of items of the outward order are present to my sense which never properly enter into my experience.  Why?  Because they have no interest for me.  My experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items which I notice shape my mind.  Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.   Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word.  It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive."

There.  In a rather large nut-shell, that is pretty much what artists do:  manipulate selective interest.  We hope that the viewer agrees to attend to our choice.   Now let's step away from our screens and selectively focus on something we find beautiful.  That's it!  Ain't consciousness grand!

(As a side-note, Finding Nemo provided the only possible title!)

Mick Herron’s delightfully funny take on British spies is titled Slow Horses;  you find out pretty quickly in the novel that the term refers to less-than-stellar spies who can’t be allowed out and must be somehow stabled so that they cannot harm themselves or the nation.  

I am a Slow Painter in a that and another sense.  Jon has given up asking me what I painted each day.  The answer is inevitably along the lines of “so-and-so’s eyes” or “that tree on the far right.”  Today, if I am diligent,  it may be “the value study for In the Gorge” #3.  I even did the focal point yesterday;  today brought the endless blur of dead cedars partially or fully emerged in the river.  Darned it there aren’t quite a few more than I noticed at the time.

I took the reference shot from a bridge above a lovely section of the gorge on a clear summer’s day.  Jon had been instructed to fish as usual.  No trouble selling that assignment.  I leaned out and took forty or fifty shots, of which several were worth using.   But there they sat.  The famous story I’ve told before about Winston Churchill bears repeating here.  A Sunday painter, he sat gazing at his blank canvas one week;  his friend grabbed a brush and made a dark swipe across the expanse of white:  “The enemy is vanquished.”  

It took the pressure of three upcoming shows to summon the courage to vanquish my own enemy.   This is not unusual.  And, as usual, a slow horse I remain.  Last night when I broke down and asked Jon to come see what I’d accomplished, his first comment was “Oh, I wouldn’t have chosen that one.”  And only then did he tell me that his left arm was on an awkward angle because he was trying to keep his prized Hardy bag out of the water.  Normally he would not carry it while wading deep, but the prospect of being immortalized must have inspired his inner fashionista. Dang.  Hadn’t noticed that the arm was in a funny place until he mentioned it.  Note that once I'm painting, it is no longer Jon's arm.  MINE!  But I decided he was right anyway. So today’s first act of regret was to tuck the forearm in front where it belonged.  The rest of today has been spent rendering the complex calligraphy of the downed trees in white and burnt umber.  It's 5, I’m cross-eyed and my arches collapsed several hours ago.    Both I and the light are failing. 

Once in a while, some well-meaning soul suggests that I enter an Art Battle, which is essentially a speed test.  

​Fat chance.