Painting #33

Here is my painting number 33:

#33, May 2016 (45 x 25.5 cm)

The idea for this painting was basically a dappled sky such as that shown in my source photo (below). I am fairly happy with the painting – although I may still fiddle a bit with the road tomorrow – something in the perspective is a bit off. Some of the cloud edges also need some blending to take the edge of some edges.

On my iPad the photo appears too yellow, but on my computer the colour temperature seems about right.

Source Photo with frame PhotoShopped onto it

Here is my underpainting – started early this morning, then I started the sky mid  afternoon and was finished by early evening. This painting is bigger than anything I have painted before in this current run, and almost the biggest I have ever attempted in oil. Much learned from this experience.

I have often felt guilty if I made an oil painting look good mainly because of a sky effect – it is relatively easy to blend a good sky with oil paintings – watercolour requires a whole new level of skill by comparison. But in this painting, I had a mighty battle on hand to get the colour of the sky right, and to make the light behind the clouds come through with the right value and pattern without creating a spotty effect. I am not sure I succeeded, but there you have it.

In my thoughts as I painted this was the poem Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which begins “Glory be to God for dappled things”. It is fitting that the poem’s second line mentions “For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”, because as you can see the source photo actually shows Nguni cattle with their beautiful spotted skin under that dappled sky. Here is the poem:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poetry Foundation

All day today as the rain fell on my studio roof I was aware of the earth, the green and damp blanket of the New Zealand countryside all around me. At times I looked outside and reflected on how many things had to happen as it happened – from the time of the big bang right to this moment – to provide me with an opportunity to create away in my solitude. So much to be thankful for – this earth.

I understand the urge to go to Mars – like one TED presenter said: “it is in our DNA to explore”. But I guess our species comes in a dappled tapestry of inner worlds, and I feel I belong on this earth, where at present I have a unique, short span to explore inward – where another infinity lies.

Besides, perhaps we will only find more of the same – the same wars, the same politics, the same lack of purpose and meaning. If we cannot come to rest in contentment in the world we have been given, the roads have come to their end already…

Road’s End

The roads have come to their end now,

they don’t go any farther, they turn here,

over on the earth there.

You can’t go any farther if you don’t want

to go to the moon or the planets. Stop now

in time, and turn to a wasp’s nest or a cow’s track,

a volcano opening or a clatter of stones in the woods-

it’s all the same. Something else.

They won’t go any farther as I’ve said

without changing, the engine to horseshoes,

the gear shift to a fit branch

   which you hold loose in your hand

– what the hell is this?

Rolf Jacobsen

translated by Robert Bly

 Many thanks to all who have encouraged me with follows, likes and comment. I hope you are truly happy and content.