Some of my bias against faking it comes from my love of portraiture. For the same reason that I wouldn’t paint a forest of identical trees, I choose to individualize portraits; otherwise the painting risks conjuring a portrait of no-one in particular or worse, no-one at all. Predictably, I love Picasso's blue period and nothing much later. It is richly possible to be accurate, even beautiful, and still painterly. For me, that means preparing by taking multiple shots in order to study the subject from all angles, giving me a lot of information about everything from eye colour to characteristic expressions. I often spend longer studying the digitals than in painting. If the loved ones of the person I have painted did not react with warm recognition, I would consider the portrait to have failed. In fact, the hardest portraits I have done have been those of people I have never met and of whom I have only one or two photos. It feels like flying blind.
Not every artist feels this way. Leo Mol, the brilliant sculptor, could tell a big and personal story in a few elegant lines: my favourite Mol sculpture is of Tom Lamb, a renowned bush pilot. Mol solved the problem of evoking a bush plane by portraying Lamb reaching up to pull down hard on a single propellor blade (and thereby start the engine). Mol’s problem-solving knocks me dead; I only wish that Lamb did not look like all of Mol’s other subjects.
Even in the plant family, rugged individuals deserve highly individualized treatment! Old trees are a case in point. Especially when paddling, we pass the odd one who makes me gasp with delight; unfortunately if we pass it too quickly and don’t paddle that section of river soon after, it can take years to find it again. I never stop looking, though, and “The Ancients” series honours the gloriously entangled root systems of those trees who have somehow survived decades (even centuries in the case of white cedars) of extremes; they are my arboreal heroes, painted as faithfully as I can manage. In this one you will even note a few river-smoothed rocks captured in their winding roots many years earlier.
By the way, I expected to have this painting in the spring show (if you didn’t receive an invitation yesterday, please contact me to request one), but I should have read the fine-print for the COAA Juried Show. It is committed to The Art Gallery of Hamilton until the end of April, but will probably be in the July Twist Gallery show.
Not every artist feels this way. Leo Mol, the brilliant sculptor, could tell a big and personal story in a few elegant lines: my favourite Mol sculpture is of Tom Lamb, a renowned bush pilot. Mol solved the problem of evoking a bush plane by portraying Lamb reaching up to pull down hard on a single propellor blade (and thereby start the engine). Mol’s problem-solving knocks me dead; I only wish that Lamb did not look like all of Mol’s other subjects.
Even in the plant family, rugged individuals deserve highly individualized treatment! Old trees are a case in point. Especially when paddling, we pass the odd one who makes me gasp with delight; unfortunately if we pass it too quickly and don’t paddle that section of river soon after, it can take years to find it again. I never stop looking, though, and “The Ancients” series honours the gloriously entangled root systems of those trees who have somehow survived decades (even centuries in the case of white cedars) of extremes; they are my arboreal heroes, painted as faithfully as I can manage. In this one you will even note a few river-smoothed rocks captured in their winding roots many years earlier.
By the way, I expected to have this painting in the spring show (if you didn’t receive an invitation yesterday, please contact me to request one), but I should have read the fine-print for the COAA Juried Show. It is committed to The Art Gallery of Hamilton until the end of April, but will probably be in the July Twist Gallery show.
"The Ancients" #2 glaze oil 36 x 48
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