Another Start

Invented Still Life – First Stage (Oil on Canvas, 10 x 8 inches)

Still practising starts. This morning before work I did the above start from a thumbnail of an invented still life I did a night or two ago (below). 

To me this is a very promising image containing the sense of mystery, melancholy and play of light and shadow that I like to see in art. There are a few errors I can see, like the shelf dropping off to the right. But it is a good start, and maybe one day soon I will have the guts to finish it!

Hawthorne said:

Don’t paint thinly as a student – later you will, but there will be something lacking unless you first learn to paint with more pigment. Paint with freedom, it gives you more mastery of the nature of paint. Make a lot of starts; wait till later to try to finish things. Do three of four of these studies every day, and leave the picture making to those who call themselves artists. (from: Hawthorne on Painting). [italics mine]

I am starting to enjoy being a complete novice at painting in oil. First steps are important. So important, in fact, that Cavafy wrote a poem about it:

The First Step

The young poem Eumenes

complained one day to Theocritus:

“I have been writing for two years now

and I have done only one idyll.

It is my only finished work.

Alas, it is steep, I see it,

The stairway of Poetry is so steep:

and from the first step where now I stand,

poor me, I shall never ascend.”

“These words,” Theocritus said,

“are unbecoming and blasphemous.

And if you are on the first step,

you ought to be proud and pleased.

Coming as far as this is not little;

what you have achieved is great glory.

For even this first step

is far distant from the common herd.

To set your foot upon this step

you must rightfully be a citizen

of the city of ideas.

And in that city it is hard

and rare to be naturalized.

In her market place you find Lawmakers

whom no adventurer can dupe.

Coming as far as this is not little;

what you have achieved is great glory.”

C.P. Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven, in The Complete Poems of Cavafy 

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