Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Vision Trees, my painting

Vision Trees, 2011, 74cm x 56cm, 29" x 22", India inks, acrylic inks, oils, 300lb Arches watercolour paper.

Perhaps this needs more contrast? One of the difficulties with trying to do a painting quickly - usually something like this takes about a month - an hour or two 4 or 5 days a week. And perhaps I will continue to tinker, who knows.

The sheet of thick paper is large. I videotaped the making of this painting. It nearly crashed my computer, and I had to copy large blocks of files to a quickly filling external hard drive to make room for the 3 hours or so of footage that are an unbelievable 160GB (which I'll delete after I've made the video). That's been sped up to about 13 minutes, and I have to edit it today to half that. Then add a voiceover of the story of my vision trees.

I don't know why they look so delicate. These trees, on the real street where they dwell and where I pass them daily, are too big for me to put my arms around, diameters of maybe 6'-12'.

Also, trying to paint a whole painting in an afternoon/evening (there were, as always, technical glitches, like I had to rush out and buy a USB extension cord because the 10yo USB hub I was using transferred the video so slowly I'd be still waiting today if I'd kept using it).

In pen and ink I laboriously drew the gaps of light in the trees, but when smearing paint on with my fingers and scratching it with my fingernails, that got covered up. Do I spend more money I don't have and purchase some pale lemon green acrylic ink and try to lighten those areas? The layers of paint as you see them here are not thick enough to give the painting enough presence for me, and yet I could not apply the paint more thickly without losing the detail of the ink lines of leaves.

On the other hand, the lightness may grow on me and I may leave it as is. We are in the exuberance of spring, the budding greens, vibrant, pale, luminescent everywhere.

I went back through old emails to find the ritual a friend who I am unfortunately no longer in contact with suggested when I lived in Vancouver, and the story unfolds from there. But that's for the video, so you'll just have to wait.

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Festival of the Trees tomorrow! There's still time to get an entry in -send me your link. I'll be composing the essay tonight, and have it posted by 6am tomorrow at the latest, promise.

6 comments:

  1. OOOOhhhh this is So perfect !!! there is light & movement & something immediate in their line ,,,, love :) !

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  2. Anonymous6:29 PM

    Somehow reminds me of Van Gogh; the motion of your strokes maybe. And that you paint how the trees feel more than their surface appearance. I think they look so delicate because the leaves feel so...leafy. Very nice.
    One senses the inspiration of vision.

    I'm putting one together of my old vision tree, which I'll try to get to you early this evening.

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  3. Yay! I look forward to your vision tree, A.Decker. The drier version here seems tame compared to the wet painting in process in the video, where, yes, so speeded up especially, I can see what you mean. Because I had to get this done, I actually found myself scratching the paint with my fingernails whereas in a more leisurely time I'd definitely use the palette knife. :) It was, so Van Gogh, which had me laughing (just a little).

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  4. Thanks, Frank... I just browsed your blog about art, wow, I'm subscribing,

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___