Artists who paint for the sheer love of creating art paint what we love. We are driven to produce beauty and we always hope that someone will come along who loves our work as much as we love the act of creating it. Whether or not that happens, we keep on painting.
Many of our paintings never find a home while others seem to fly out the door or off the walls of a gallery almost as soon as they are finished. Once in a while, a particular painting becomes a personal favorite. There is something about it that says, "I am special." If asked, we would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is that makes this one painting different from all the others.
My latest painting is both an inspiration and an experiment. It came about one evening while I was preparing for a long telephone chat with my friend, Camilla Perrill, who spends her winters in Florida. Camilla and I share wine time. Wine time in our households begins at 5:00 p.m. - kind of a joke that has evolved as a good time to sit down and enjoy our glass of wine before dinner. Sometimes Camilla calls at wine time and sometimes she doesn't call until wine:thirty or I might call her at wine:forty-five. We like to say that we enjoy having wine together apart. It's our special time.
On this particular evening, I had barely settled into Carl's recliner when an unexpected streak of sunshine came streaming through the window and turned all of the objects on the table beside me into a fantasy of light. I grabbed the camera and took a picture, one-handedly, while talking to Camilla. That was the inspiration for the above painting.
The experimental part came when I began the painting. One tried and tested technique for creating a focal point is to surround it with darker values. Those darker values make the viewer's eye go directly to the lighter part of the painting. I wanted the shadowy figure in the background to be my focal point but it was surrounded by bright, bouncing light. Would the same theory work in reverse? I wasn't so sure. My other challenge was that I have never attempted to paint so many clear, crystal objects – especially while looking at a blurry, out-of-focus photograph. It was a recipe for disaster. Instead, the painting does everything I want it to do. It is one of my favorites.
I took it to our Southern Colours session last Friday where it was pronounced a success. Several of my most talented artist friends announced, without my asking, that their attention goes directly to my shadowy figure in the background. Carl loves it. I love it. But even better, Father Paddy loves it so much he immediately asked to purchase it. I had to tell him that it is already committed to a gallery but, if it doesn't sell there, he will get first dibs.
I named the painting 'Bird Girl' because the shadowy figure is a replica of a famous statue in an old Savannah cemetery. She stands on our fireplace hearth. The original Bird Girl was featured on the cover of the novel, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and was in the movie of the same name.
Father Paddy didn't ask the name of the painting – he wants it, no matter what. Now I wonder what would attract a Catholic priest from Ireland to this particular painting? Why would he immediately love it? After looking at it carefully, I think it might be that he sees a lot of symbolism in it. There is the glass of wine, perhaps symbolic of the chalice or the water into wine Bible story. He may be seeing the shadowy figure as symbolic of the Madonna and the globe as representative of the world. Or maybe he just loves it without really knowing why.
I'm going to ask him one of these days. Meanwhile, what do you think?
Many of our paintings never find a home while others seem to fly out the door or off the walls of a gallery almost as soon as they are finished. Once in a while, a particular painting becomes a personal favorite. There is something about it that says, "I am special." If asked, we would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is that makes this one painting different from all the others.
My latest painting is both an inspiration and an experiment. It came about one evening while I was preparing for a long telephone chat with my friend, Camilla Perrill, who spends her winters in Florida. Camilla and I share wine time. Wine time in our households begins at 5:00 p.m. - kind of a joke that has evolved as a good time to sit down and enjoy our glass of wine before dinner. Sometimes Camilla calls at wine time and sometimes she doesn't call until wine:thirty or I might call her at wine:forty-five. We like to say that we enjoy having wine together apart. It's our special time.
On this particular evening, I had barely settled into Carl's recliner when an unexpected streak of sunshine came streaming through the window and turned all of the objects on the table beside me into a fantasy of light. I grabbed the camera and took a picture, one-handedly, while talking to Camilla. That was the inspiration for the above painting.
The experimental part came when I began the painting. One tried and tested technique for creating a focal point is to surround it with darker values. Those darker values make the viewer's eye go directly to the lighter part of the painting. I wanted the shadowy figure in the background to be my focal point but it was surrounded by bright, bouncing light. Would the same theory work in reverse? I wasn't so sure. My other challenge was that I have never attempted to paint so many clear, crystal objects – especially while looking at a blurry, out-of-focus photograph. It was a recipe for disaster. Instead, the painting does everything I want it to do. It is one of my favorites.
I took it to our Southern Colours session last Friday where it was pronounced a success. Several of my most talented artist friends announced, without my asking, that their attention goes directly to my shadowy figure in the background. Carl loves it. I love it. But even better, Father Paddy loves it so much he immediately asked to purchase it. I had to tell him that it is already committed to a gallery but, if it doesn't sell there, he will get first dibs.
I named the painting 'Bird Girl' because the shadowy figure is a replica of a famous statue in an old Savannah cemetery. She stands on our fireplace hearth. The original Bird Girl was featured on the cover of the novel, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and was in the movie of the same name.
Father Paddy didn't ask the name of the painting – he wants it, no matter what. Now I wonder what would attract a Catholic priest from Ireland to this particular painting? Why would he immediately love it? After looking at it carefully, I think it might be that he sees a lot of symbolism in it. There is the glass of wine, perhaps symbolic of the chalice or the water into wine Bible story. He may be seeing the shadowy figure as symbolic of the Madonna and the globe as representative of the world. Or maybe he just loves it without really knowing why.
I'm going to ask him one of these days. Meanwhile, what do you think?
