This point, where charcoal meets paper, is where a painting’s future lies.
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| Spring on Beech Hill, 8×10, available. Dark skies may not give you great shadows, but they deepen color saturation. |
Yesterday was the first truly lovely day of the year, with soft still air, limpid light, and a hint of color in the bare trees. I had already chained myself to the mast of updating my website so I met Ken DeWaard at Spruce Head in late afternoon. As if ordered up by some great old Hollywood director, golden light poured over the fishing shacks. It was so composed and serene that even a novice could have painted a great painting.
I, therefore, made a hash of the whole process.
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| My struggling composition. Ouch. |
I’ve been teaching an intensive series on composition. I swear it’s scrambled my brain, since this is the third painting in a row where my composition has been utter dreck. I tell my students that my first rule is “don’t be boring,” and then I keep breaking that rule myself.
I swear, the next time I’m having one of these brain cramps, I’m going to just copy off Ken’s panel. It’d be easier on him. When Carol isn’t happy with her painting, Carol whines. After listening to me for what felt like an hour, he asked a salient and obvious question: what was my painting about?
That stopped me cold.
“Well,” I hesitated, “I think what interests me is that collection of blue bins on the dock.” That’s where I should have stopped and redrawn the whole thing, cropping in much closer, but I didn’t. I was still seduced by the grandeur all around me.
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| Boatyard, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, available. This painting is growing on me. |
This point, where charcoal meets paper, is where a painting’s future lies. All the seagulls I could tack in there later, all the beautiful brushwork I could slather over the canvas, can’t save a teetering composition.
Everyone has a mistake they make repeatedly. Mine is always trying to cram more than one painting onto a canvas. “Respect the picture plane,” I tell my students, and then proceed to not do so myself.
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| Then there’s this painting of fishing shacks that I haven’t finished yet, but I think has promise. |
In this case, I was trying to shove an entire world of manmade and heavenly beauty into one small rectangle. But I can tell you in words that it was sublime: ducks quacking in the distance, the tide beginning to trickle in from the far channels, the perfect still reflections in the water, even the pungent smell of saltwater soil awakening from spring. It was all dancing deliriously in front of me, and I couldn’t push it all onto canvas fast enough.
The beauty of the artist’s life is the number of redos we get. I have to go to New York today, but Spruce Head will still be there when I come home. I can take a deep breath and try again, and maybe, just maybe, I won’t be overwhelmed by the perfection of it all.
You might think I find all this failure depressing, but actually I see it as a hopeful sign. When I suddenly start regressing, it means I’m subconsciously incorporating something new in my painting. I can’t wait to see where I go.