Light Before the Storm 12 x 24 oil
Nature has a way of dazzling the mind and thrilling the heart with her powerful displays of light and texture and nuance. I rush home to try to capture the feeling in paint, but my own puny human powers fall short. It is an endless game, a hamster wheel trap into which I have fallen, and I see no end in sight. As soon as I begrudgingly abandon my efforts on one piece, my imagination and desire is sparked by the next thing I see, and off I go again, ad infinitum.
Portraiture, on the other hand, is a sort of respite from this frustration, because when the goal is achieving resemblance, sheer perseverance can apply, and though as a painting it does not soar, it can still mark the meeting of milestones, the progress that comes slowly, imperceptibly at times, but it's a simple reward that encourages me to slog on. Randall offered to sit for me, insisting that I should be working for life instead of from photo reference, and we managed an hour of it; the results were god-awful, but after he left I continued to work on it from snaps I had taken, and after a while the resemblence did appear, not perfect, but passable.
Randall 11x14 oil
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