Painting in the Heat

The Pool in August

The heat of summer has changed the landscape, dropping water levels, bleaching stone and sharpening the colors.  I find it hard to do more than work on short studies; Time seems to be whispering in my ear too often for me to spend hours toiling on any one thing.  

Where I Walk the Dog

Sometimes as I begin a piece and get the lights and darks blocked in, I have a feeling that it might turn out well, that I'll be able to nail it this time.  But as I sling paint and do the hard work required to bring it to a finish, I discover my skills didn't play out exactly as I had hoped, and the thing looks a little cartoonish, or unfinished or just plain disappointing.  Like old age, painting ain't for sissies, so I pick myself back up and start something new.

More often than not, I change gears and try quick sketches to loosen up and hone skills.  I pull up old photos on the laptop and pick a few faces.  Below are a few done in one sitting.  A couple of them took only ten or fifteen minutes each, and though they aren't finished paintings, I recognize my friends in them. I doubt they'd be flattered by the portrait, but that wasn't the point of the exercise.  Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to keep working at it.  Maybe the glory and success comes later.

Nature, though, is the real artist, and the wonderful thing about painting is all the time spent admiring what Nature has accomplished.  If painting does anything, it causes one to see with eyes more open to the nuances surrounding us.  It is a bit tedious at times to translate everything taken in through the eyes into paint colors, and sometimes I find I'm not listening to someone talk, but instead I'm evalauating the color on their brow, noticing the spread of their eyes or the hook of their nose; it's like living in a Kurasawa film sometimes.  But I find it so rewarding that I don't mind at all that my inner life flies along on a trajectory I would not have imagined a few years ago.  

And finally, just for the heck of it, a photo of an artichoke I had recently: I've never seen one with such a coppery color inside.  Or maybe I'm just hallucinating now with painter's eyes.