I admit to finding it difficult to say goodbye to autumn. Of all the seasons, it is certainly the most flamboyant. The whole world flames and glows. The pastels of spring are a distant memory, replaced by a palette of deeps in cadmiums and purples. Autumn is a saucy old tart, dressed to the nines and living it up.
Marilynne Robinson has a great line in her novel Housekeeping: "She was an old woman but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease." I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise. Autumn, on the other hand, pulls it off with aplomb, making the lapse into dormancy, even death, look like a celebration.
The problem artists have is that when it's over, it's OVER. The world becomes muted and quiet very suddenly; it actually takes me a week or so to adjust my eyes when the spectacle ends. And then throwing that remembered brilliance of colour onto a canvas invariably looks phony and overdone. Most will tell you that autumn is by far the most difficult season to paint.
But we do it anyway.
Marilynne Robinson has a great line in her novel Housekeeping: "She was an old woman but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease." I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise. Autumn, on the other hand, pulls it off with aplomb, making the lapse into dormancy, even death, look like a celebration.
The problem artists have is that when it's over, it's OVER. The world becomes muted and quiet very suddenly; it actually takes me a week or so to adjust my eyes when the spectacle ends. And then throwing that remembered brilliance of colour onto a canvas invariably looks phony and overdone. Most will tell you that autumn is by far the most difficult season to paint.
But we do it anyway.
"Mountain Ash in Autumn" oil 10 x 30
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