"Forest Music" 4"x8" oil on veneer
This is a painting done to assuage my imagination. Pulled out of the veneer it is painted on, this is an image fabricated out of the internal vocabulary acquired during plein air painting in the mountains of Lake Tahoe. Round granite, shaped by glaciation, clear streams, the manna of mountains that sustain the valleys, Sequoia whose roots and leaves filter air and water we breadth.
It has a bit to do with a series I have in mind regarding 'watersheds', which are the be all-end-all treasure that all good things literally flow from. Drinking, irrigation, flushing your toilet and in the PNW, electricity. Pretty mundane considering the real value of beauty and inspiration derived from the Sylvan platitudes of a burbling brook that nurtures giant redwoods, sequoias or ponderosa pine. Where gods and demigods, silfs, dryads and the fabled kingdom of Lothlorian come.
I stained the veneer with Prussian Blue and chose the middle value of ultramarine deep and raw umber, using Prussian for the darkest value and cad yellow for my highlights. As Michaelangelo was said to do, I gazed into the grain of the veneer until I saw the image that was there and proceeded to pull it out of the board simply watched the drawing unfold, careful to interject the right values to the appropriate hue. It is a technique very similar to working in scratchboard or as some say, ink board. Scratching through the ink to let the white show through, working light to dark and back again.
Fun stuff!
No comments:
Post a Comment