I went out today in search of trees. November is the month in which the line dividing bare tree and leaves descends. Come Thanksgiving, the process is complete.
Failing to find any trees which interested me, I painted this jeep by the riverside instead.
I spent a chunk of last Tuesday wandering around northern Kentucky near the Indiana border, in search of something around which I could build a painting. This is lonely work. You turn down unfamiliar roads. You make many sketches. You feel every squandered gallon of gasoline.
This sort of rambling looks a whole lot like laziness, unless you’ve tried it yourself. Birge Harrison said that great compositions lie all around us. Maybe. Me, I have to drive around sometimes.
Twenty miles later I wound up at McGlasson’s Fruit Stand in Hebron, KY, a place I’ve painted many times, but where I’ve only emerged once with a decent picture. I don’t know why I keep banging my head against that particular brick wall, except that I love the place, and I love the people who own it. They’ve given me the run of the place for ten years. I managed to do a decent picture there last October, but it was the first good one out of dozens of failed tries. It was mostly a cloudscape, with a little McGlassons to provide context:
This time around, I took a spot near one of the green-roofed buildings shown here, where a little arrangement caught my eye:
One tries to take the arrangements one finds verbatim, but this one required moving stuff around. The first day’s lay-in will demonstrate this:
This roughly painted lay-in, painted over an old, failed canvas, shows how I brought the foreground pumpkins closer to the corn stalks. Whereas the other picture, with the wild sky, was a landscape, this thing is just a still life, painted outdoors. Were this my own property, I would have physically moved the pumpkins where I wanted them. But out of respect to the McGlasson family, I moved them with my paintbrush.
That night, while waiting for Day One to dry, I messed around with the motif in Photoshop to make it more closely resemble what I want the painting to look like. The pumpkins’ job was the function of most foreground objects in still life painting: to draw the viewer’s eye into the picture.
Here’s how to looked at the end of the second day. More scribbly than I’d prefer, but the light effect was pretty good. Someone whose judgment I respect told me to stop. I listened him out.
Anything painted outdoors, whether a landscape, a cloudscape or a still life, is really a portrait of a day of the year, and a time of day. It is never a portrait of a year, because each year brings the same four seasons around, like a carousel. An autumn on 2020 is about like an autumn of 1968; I’ve been around for both of them. But a portrait of October 13 and 16, 2020, is unique to those two days.
I began a 16x20” a week ago, of a boat and a small jet ski.
my image of the first day’s work is poor, but here’s how it looked at the end of the second day:
And here’s the end of Day Three:
That red boat in the background just happened to be there. As the image was crisped up a bit, the red boat began to dominate the picture, despite the small area it occupies.
At the end of the fourth day, I thought I was done. But a high school chum with an excellent visual sense mentioned that the his “eye kept getting pulled to the red Bimini cover in the background.” And once he spoke up, it was obvious that he was absolutely right.
So I went back to the locale this afternoon. I was hoping to borrow one of the orange bumpers which are tied to boats at marinas all over the place, but no one was around to loan me one. But to my delight, the owner of the jet ski had a gas can on the other side of the craft. Miraculously, it wasn’t tied down. I carried it to the foreground of the picture, pointing its spout leftward and into the middle distance.
I’d brought along a red towel, which I placed on the trailer’s fender. The towel, the gas can and the red boat seemed to tie the foreground and background together.
One final fling. I returned with a yard of red velour. Exactly what a bolt of fabric is doing on the gravel at the Riverside Marina is anybody’s guess, but it describes the third vertex of our red triangle. Actually, the bolt of cloth, the gas can and the red towel line up more or less, counterbalancing the Bimini cover — whatever the heck a Bimini cover is — in the middleground.
Enough already, time to move on.
The heat and humidity of summer are a small price to pay for its dazzle. I chase after it, but it can be elusive. I am suspecting that the more closely one tries to nail drawing and value, the more the splash of the sun hides away from the brush. One might liken it to taming a mustang. Such a creature must be tamed if it’s to be of any use, but if this work isn’t done wisely, one risks breaking the horse, rather than simply taming it, and in so doing losing the very qualities for which a mustang is so prized. Once a wild horse is broken, it can never be unbroken.
And at this point in time, the same seems to be true of me, and of paintings which should be nudged toward completion with daring, with wisdom, with a sense of poetry, and with a willingness to accept that things might be better accomplished in ways one has never before attempted.
The first session of this view of a beached houseboat had the dazzle of noonday sun, captured in a way I don’t think I’ve ever captured it before. I gave the scene about ninety minutes of work, straddling high noon. The shadows of the boat, particularly its underside, are luminous. The values of the shadows are very close to the values of the lights. Was this actually the case? I’m not certain. I worked from dark to light, and what you see here is what I came up with, with no editing. And, at least in my own case, editing is an absolute requirement: until the canvas is covered, I can’t accurately judge whether the notes I put down are the right ones. Absent any re-evaluation on my part, this was a statement, made rapidly and uncritically. The editing would take place the next day. Unfortunately.
Can a picture really be keyed this high? Was this a legitimate use of the three scales — of light to dark, of warm to cool, and of muted to saturated color — from which the painter fashions his illusions?
Looking back, I must conclude that I accidentally got it right the first time, and nevertheless decided to improve on it. It was one of those cases in which the truth stared me in the face, but I refused to believe my own eyes. This thing may have needed some neatening up, but its hue, value and chroma were the best description of blinding sunshine I’d ever blundered into.
I snapped a photo of the scene. Perhaps this was a mistake. The photo was certainly an improvement over the crude first day’s painting, but cameras don’t do well with capturing the glare of bright sunshine. I hate to venture into cliché territory here, but while the photo captures the way the scene looked, it entirely missed how it felt.
I baked the painting on the dashboard of my truck, and a few hours later, scraped it down, so to prepare its surface for a second day’s work.
Here is that second day’s work, done in practically identical conditions. If the drawing’s improved, the scintillating color of the original is gone. I don’t hate the picture, but the qualities which so excited me the first day are gone.
I should have remembered the old saying: If it ain’t broke…
So I went back a few days later, under similar sky conditions, and give it another shot on a fresh canvas.
So here’s Day One of the second try. The dazzle of the original’s first take is still gone.
Day Two. The dazzle’s still gone, and I’m not sure how to get it back.
What’s the moral of the story? I guess one ought to think very carefully about what one wishes to accomplish with a picture, and perhaps give consideration to stopping altogether on the first day, even if the drawing looks ragged. I would dearly love to have that first day of the previous incarnation. But in the sunsplash days left to me this summer, maybe I can grab a few dazzlers, and not break them, as one risks doing with any sort of wild mustang,