A Rose By Any Other Name — acrylic on canvas, 250 x 250 mm, 2019. Available.
“God bless our contradictions, those parts of us which seem out of character. Let us be boldly and gladly out of character. Let us be creatures of paradox and variety: creatures of contrast; of light and shade: creatures of faith. God be our constant. Let us step out of character into the unknown, to struggle and love and do what we will. Amen.”
—
‘A Note on God’ by Michael Leunig
Another milestone and another slideshow… seven years on WordPress! This last year has been a whirl of six-word poems, experimental word art, black canvas paintings, and music. Lots of music. Not a bad year at all. In fact quite a good one : )
Exploding Colour — acrylic on canvas, 250 x 250 mm, 2018. Available.
In the words of painter Adam Wolpert…
“Whenever I try to finish a painting by carefully cleaning up all the parts—removing smudges, perfecting the drawing, spiffing and polishing—as I work, the spirit slowly drains out of it. This approach to finishing leaves me unsatisfied and leads to my either abandoning the painting before it is complete or just stopping and calling it “finished” in spite of my dissatisfaction. I know that Nature is not polished and uniform, all clear, clean and tidy, but raw and variable, messy, ambiguous, and indefinite. And above all, nature is dynamic. It stands to reason that a painting of Nature must somehow include these qualities. What if focusing on details and formal accuracy won’t ever get me there?”
“What if I just focus on representing the underlying essence of my subject and my relationship to, and feeling about, that essence?….Perhaps the best way to finish a painting is to try to move the subject ever more towards that state. I know when that character is developing in my painting because the image inspires that particular feeling I have when I stand before it in Nature. I know to keep working as long as I can make something more like its essential self. I know I need to stop as the image begins to move away from itself and become something else. Mysteriously, sometimes this process goes on for many days and even weeks as I devote hour after hour to the piece, other times I breathe a painting into being in a few hours, almost effortlessly, and only need the good sense to leave it alone (which is surprisingly difficult sometimes). So perhaps, in this way, my practice of finishing can be guided by Nature herself.”
These six-word stories were prompted by the Page Flutter Six-Word Story Challenge. The background is a detail of a new mini abstract (below) created with some of the paint left over from ‘The High Country’ and a little added purple.
6. Studied. Tested. Passed. Celebrated. Tested again.
7. The overburdened workhorse summoned the cavalry.
8. The inventor improvised, creating pure fiction.
9. Her instincts were hardly ever wrong.
10. The summit wasn’t their high point.
11. Her big break was not “lucky”!
12. The grind required fresh beans daily.
[August prompts: tested, workhorse, the inventor, instincts, summit, big break, the grind.]
XXXs — acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 mm, 2018. Available.
XXXs — drawing room mock-up
The High Country — acrylic on canvas panel, framed, 205 x 255 mm, 2018. Available soon.
If you’ve ever been through Springfield on your way to the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, you would have seen this view of Mt Torlesse, Korowai/Torlesse Tussocklands Park. It is one of my favourite parts of the country. It’s also a landscape that I painted in 2014 which you can see here. I found it interesting comparing the two paintings ~ four years has gone by in my art journey and I hope I’ve learnt a thing or two along the way.
‘The High Country’ is currently waiting to be framed and will be available soon. It is the first of a number of landscapes that I’ve decided to revisit and paint again, this time as part of my ‘black canvas experiment’.
And I’m not going to get tired of painting on black canvas any time soon.
🏔🏔🏔 Onward and upward. 🏔🏔🏔
