Thursday, May 13, 2010

Spring Rain (working title)


acrylic on stretched canvas with inclusions
20 x 24 inches

I laid out this painting with my left hand, and am switching hands as I work.  As it took shape, I found myself liking the somewhat unfinished look.  Perhaps because rainy, misty spring days themselves have that look. 

I was going to use white paint to give some bright spots, but happened to have some foil laying about. So I experimented on some small practice pieces to see how that might work.  I liked the look, and tentatively set some foil torn to shape on this one. This photo does not do justice to the way the foil works with the shapes and the bits of red in the composition, especially in room level light.  I like it.   

I am nearly finished with it now, and have set it aside with an isolating coat to protect it. In a few days or a week, I'll make a decision about whether to work more on it, or simply leave it be.

1 comment:

Mashcode said...

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

... Pound's commentary on this poem ...

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation ... not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that -- a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.

That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realised quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of "non-representative" painting, a painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour. ....

That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint ...

http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/daily_poetics/2007/02/the_apparition_.html