#P19: Edge of the Hill

This is a view from my walking track. It is the biggest pastel painting I have attempted so far. The source photo and a charcoal study is shown below.

As you can see from the source photo, the final painting is very different. I was really after the contour lines of the landscape, and the lowland feeling of the foreground. I knew from the charcoal study (below) that the composition has lots of potential. I think I will go at it a few more times using different variations.

I am starting to really enjoy Jane Hirschfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Here is the last few verses of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems which is discussed in the book:

...
A Moment— We uncertain step 
For newness of the night— 
Then— fit our Vision to the Dark— 
And meet the Road— erect— 

And so of larger— Darkness— 
Those Evenings of the Brain— 
When not a Moon disclose a sign— 
Or Star— come out— within— 

The Bravest— grope a little— 
And sometimes hit a Tree 
Directly in the Forehead— 
But as they learn to see— 

Either the Darkness alters— 
Or something in the sight 
Adjusts itself to Midnight— 
And Life steps almost straight. 

Emily Dickinson, quoted in:
Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows: 
How Great Poems Transform the World (pp. 157-158).

Yesterday I had to put to sleep an old cat left here by the previous owner. It lived around my studio and though it generally shunned humans, it often came and sat on my lap in the mornings when I meditated. What was it in those eyes, just before the needle went in – was it blame or thanks? I will miss you, old friend.

Hirchfield says:

“Light is expansive, inclusive of others, and life; night is solitude, the unknowable, and death. A person is rightly sent into the dark with an offered blessing.”

Either the Darkness alters— 
Or something in the sight 
Adjusts itself to Midnight— 
And Life steps almost straight.

I hope you are content and happy.