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Ignorance without Bliss

3/7/2017

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“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”
― Walt Whitman


Sure, Walt.  Now try getting away with this this while painting a familiar face.  Better still, a canoe.  

No dice, huh?  I was reminded of this, as usual, the hard way.  Back in the underpainting stage, I decided to tilt our lovely old cedar-strip canoe so that the viewer could spy its deep red body;  well, didn’t this turn out to be an act of wilful self-injury.   By the time  the painting and I were into final glazes, that canoe and I were in a fight to the death.  No matter what gunnel lines I adjusted,  our beloved canoe just looked more and more drunk.  My “vagueness - ignorance, credulity” didn’t do one good thing for a watercraft which was increasingly resembling Farley Mowat’s famous  “boat who wouldn’t float.”

Well, I’m the painter so occasionally I remember to exert some control.  Now the canoe sits as straight as a prim Victorian miss, only its decking visible.  And because you no longer ”know” that it is a splendid red, I shall have to settle for telling you.  (My favourite 18th century novel was Tristram Shandy;  Sterne was the first novelist to allow the reader to imagine something for himself.)  So please imagine a deep rich singing red.

Come to think of it, you probably would have assumed that anyway..…  Okay, then.  The game is on.  What if I tell you that this canoe is deep forest green? 

​
Stay tuned.  There’s lots of layers still to come.
Picture
30 x 40 glaze oil unfinished
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