10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary 20 of 30
Painting Diary 20 of 30: New Moon, 2017
At the end of a beautiful summer I went up to Powell River BC for a weekend art jam hosted by my new friends Autumn Skye and Blake Drezet who I had just met at Beloved Festival in Oregon. I had this big 36x48 blank board in the back of the car and on the long trip up there I tried to imagine what I was going to paint over the long weekend but by the time I arrived I still had no idea what I was going to do.
The next morning the weather was perfect, it was sunny and cool and I made a cup of coffee and got set up in the back yard with my board. Since I still didn’t know what I was painting I decided to just start. I remembered my days of crazy experimentation in the Arkansas metal shop, and decided to recall some of that energy. I thew the board down in the grass and started splattering and dripping a rainbow of color all over the board. By that afternoon I was starting to see the cosmos emerge from the board so I pushed it in that direction even more.
That evening after the sun went away and we had eaten a nice home cooked meal, we stayed up and worked until very late. There was a little stage and a nice sound system to keep us motivated. At some point that night I decided that the subject of my painting was a lone moon sitting dead center. With that in place I added a mountain range in the bottom forth of the board, quickly roughing it in from my imagination. Finally around 2am I went to bed feeling good.
The next morning I was outside enjoying the sun again and while drinking my coffee and starring at the board I decided that the mountains were all wrong, I wanted water instead. But I had put a fair amount of work into the mountains at that point. Did I really want to destroy them? Yes, I did. And I’m glad I did. After establishing the water with the rising wave/funnel in the center, the painting really came alive. After another night and full day of work I left with a nearly completed painting that I was pretty happy with. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but I liked it. I like to say that a painting doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to look good. I was learning to trust my creative intuition…
New Moon, Acrylic on board, 2017