Whirling meditation

Oil on board, 9 x 12

Pitcher thistle in oil and as photo.

To grab a sudden opportunity for my first lesson in Oil Painting, I selected a photo from the permanent ‘jewel’ collection on my lab top and printed it on an automatic printer in a German photoshop in the largest possible format, 15 x 23 cm.

The first happy experience was that the oil paint nicely adhered to the type of paper on which the photo was printed. Using the photographic image, an underpainting of the blue sky, the edge of green grass and the sand in the foreground was easily achieved.

The second insight, namely that oil paint is malleable, led to ecstasy. The very attribute that I had been apprehensive about turned out to be a heavenly asset – the slow drying of oil paint. Paint could be removed, added and its hue adjusted on the evolving pitcher thistle painting over the next few days.

To generate the thistle shapes, some of paint was now scratched away from the underpainting and the exposed leaves were painted in with a darker blue green. To achieve an underpainting of the leaves, a certain blue-green color was mixed.

Two problems came up.
One, the strict adherence to the photographic outline of the leaves resulted in a stiff look. Adding flourishes here and there loosened the stiffness. The real issue was that I had loved the thistle’s zest of life without really understanding it. Learning about their organic growth through making pencil sketches was not feasible because of the very limited time available, just enough to learn basic oil paining technique.

Two, having done an underpainting of most of the leaves, the picture now looked very boring, flat.

Feeling frustrated, I searched for another of my ‘jewel’ photographs for a new motif. At this time, Karl provided psychological painting advice: Stick with it and figure out how to make the picture interesting again.

Using my computer, I zoomed in on pitcher thistle leaves to study their lovely details in hues, different lightness of blue-green, whites, blacks, greys.

The best, I could think of doing was to deviate from my path of pursuing realism. Painting edges using using darker colors and lighter colors created a mottled look. That approach obliterated the earlier flat, boring look.

Now, back at home, I am making choices. One choice would be to get a gut feeling for pitcher thistles by (1)  learning their characteristic through drawing and (2) learning their beautiful colors by painting excerpts as shown here.
Instead, I decided to follow the advice of my singing teacher from two decades ago ‘Do not repeat the same song over and over again, try some new ones’ and I selected a photograph showing water ripples. Last night, I did an underpainting of the motif on a proper canvas.

My real love, right now, is mixing colors. I adore the color that I chose for the new underpainting. I once had a T-shirt in that color.  I am liberated from fashion designers, I can invent my own colors.

For at least a decade, I had thought of trying my hand at painting. Did you have a similar experience that some new experience suddenly opened up for you?

barely any light left at the horizon,

not much light left over the land.

Is that what is happening to us?

My friend and neighbor John Johnson captured fishermen in the early morning hours on a Michigan Lake.

In New Mexico, my friend Ginger Vary photographed Sandhill cranes migrating back North.

The next picture shows my own attempt at capturing the early morning mist in northern Michigan.  It lacks in action, no people, no birds, all it shows is a rising strip of mist beyond the road.

(3)

What is it about early morning light that interests photographers?

The following two paintings of interiors by Edward Hopper served as inspiration.

While I appreciate Hopper’s genius, I don’t feel like buying into how his paintings make me feel – a persisting, nagging sense of solitude/loneliness.So far, my images, shown here on A&P, activate different emotions in my limbic system. Some of my pictures, similar to Hopper’s art, do remind me of solitude. But others remind me of strength, whimsy, or even appeal to my intellect.   I don’t feel like getting into  groove.

I am curious how other artists deal with the emotional impact of their pictures.  Continuing in their artform – painting, photography, textile art – do they get easily trapped into a particular emotional state ?

Close-ups of the dunes show

sand topped by glistening pebbles,

hopeful baby cottonwoods,

and sliding sand exposing roots of cottonwood above sand rippled by wind.

Another long-distance view shows dune rhythms.

This is were we chose to put down our roots. And yet, this summer, there have been only three hikes into the dunes. In contrast to last year, when I roamed often here and at other sites, collecting tons of dune images. What happened?

Visitors? My mother, 90 yr old, likes to sit at the beach under a shady tree, watching the waves. Likewise, my grandson, a toddler, likes playing at the beach and my friends like beach walks. But still, there was plenty of free time where I could have been roaming in solitude.

Perhaps, I felt more domestic this year, staying closer to the house, except for a couple of solitary mornings shooting rocks? Perhaps, I let my day job intrude, spending too much time at the computer?

Or, more interesting and hopeful, perhaps I am incubating who I am artwise?

Do you have periods during which you seemingly do not do much but that, in retrospect, proved to be fertile?