#63: Morning Light

This is another landscape based on a photo taken during my morning walk. The source photo is shown below – you will see the painting and the photo is quite different.

I started this exercise with a charcoal concept drawing (below). I found it very difficult to depict the early morning sunlight patches on the cold grass and still make the landscape “read right”.

In the end, I found I was more interested in the ridge – how the light worked around it and the warm colour just over the crest of the ridge amongst the fence poles. I was not at all interested in getting the colours down accurately.

The image below shows the concept and final painting side by side:

I have been slowly getting back into a more consistent meditation routine. The story of my life loses it’s solid edges, the heart softens. Certainty about purposes, expectations, meanings melts away. Wide spaces open everywhere in time, the solid knitting of my life becomes undone…

Stitches
My wife is always knitting, knitting:
Not that I watch her,
Not that I know what she thinks.

(Awake till dawn
I drowned in your eyes -
I must be dead:
Perhaps it's the mind that stirs.)

With that bamboo needle
She knits all space, piece by piece,
Hastily hauling time in.

Brass-cold, exhausted,
She drops into bed and,
Breathing calmly, falls asleep.

Her dream must be deepening,
Her knitting coming loose.

Shinkichi Takahashi, trans Lucien Stryk in 
Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breezes Enter

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