Painting in the Park in the Dark

Today I hurried off to finish out a Sunday painting in the park- one I'd started a few weeks back but figured I could develop better, and the light was just getting right- sunset, and sort of a dimness over everything. A busy day with bees, and as soon as I got the last hive buttoned up I loaded up and headed down there.

The town where I live has lost a lot of its soul- everything is cleaned up, lots of  new people with their dogs and bikes and running gear- lots of folks speaking Hindu and Russian (not that they aren't a welcome addition), and its just different. In the same place I go now, when I used to paint,there was no trail, just a tunnel in the Salmonberry that you'd  lean down and follow a long ways until you came out on the river, and there would be a 12 year old farm kid there fishing in a chair with a fire, throwing catfish on the fire to kill them, trying to catch Steelhead in this slow water, and  there was just a little strip of sand.

Now its dogs and people in outfits, or with earphones, and they have no idea, it seems to me, of the great heart of the place. None of it is  on the internet, for any little town.

What they might not see it the way the sun gets low, but can't get too low, as there is the valley wall in the west, and so its like this angled light- maybe 10 degrees- and never totally horizontal, and then  it disappears, and then there is this amazing glowing time- a half hour or less, when the sun is still technicality "up"- the sky is lit- but there is no sunlight. And the valley glows, in blues and warm lights, like a canyon, and a blackness in the shadows that's hard to paint. Actually, it's all hard to paint.

I have painted this same river for 40 years- and that's no exaggeration. 40. Not all the time- but in my studio I have a painting I did when was 20, and its of part of this same river up by North Bend, when I and my GF Mary took a road trip in the back roads in my primer black '65 VW bus(fondly remembered), and I painted. I can't recall what she did- its not like she was the sort of person to hang around and watch.

It's a better painting than I can do now. I never got better.

It's like, as you get older, and don't really practice like a violin player should, you might get smarter, but what you paint loses touch. Its no longer fresh, not exploring, not brand new in the world, try as you might. As it can't be- you can't reinvent yourself, you continue to seek the same motifs despite yourself. And if you try to break with it, unless you are a very serious and very good artist, no one likes it. Even yourself. You are drawn to certain things, and unless you spend the time you need to with them, even years,  you don't get to go through the next door-as those things are the way you get there. I don't of course know this for a fact, but its how I explain to myself why its always the same motif.

Maybe an analogy would be your signature. Its just a few letters, but to change how you write them, they subtle slants and loops, is almost impossible without extreme effort. It's called a signature as it is you- and painting is very much about making your signature, in every line, and in the motifs. You can't do otherwise even if you wanted to.

Today I sat in this small wood trying to paint the last light on the trunks of trees, while seeing the green of the grass between them. There were dried orange leaves on the ground- but not Fall leaves, just those that had dropped in summer. There was an orange light-or so I thought-  but the trunks seems to glow with green- and then there was a purple in them- and all was so dark and grey and getting moreso- it was very hard to get right (which I totally did not).

And this was round two on this painting- which is such an incredibly difficult time- so hard to try to move this from a lively sketch to something more solid- but yet not as solid as a real painting should be. Usually- easily 90% of the time- I find this to be a disaster. You can't go home again. Painting over a sketch is what separates the men from the boys. I am a boy.

Its getting late in life to think I'll ever gain it now- so I need to keep it simple.

I showed  this painting it to a friend, who has some of my work, and they said "yes, that looks like your work, I could identify it in a lineup, same lines and colors".  That's pretty much as good as it gets these days, compliment wise, but I'm OK with it.

Day 30

I think its day 30 now- painting when the weather is tolerable, trying to get through 16 canvases, to hang 10- maybe- and a few weeks to go.

I can't imagine at this point that anyone would ever read anything I am writing now, but to me it seems like a "finishing-out"- much of what I have experienced this past year, and now in interacting again with painting, has told me much about where I am in the trajectory of life, and what I have in me, and what I have left to explore, or care about.

I paint now, at almost 60, with some of the same paints I had when I was 20 - those colors you only need a bit of- that never dry, like Cadmium Orange for example.

And the palette of colors I use now has only changed slightly- as I realized I did not need some colors.

Still, I am a neophyte. The grand subtlety of color mixing, and understanding how each color mixes into another, is as hard for me as memorizing a poem. I just never will. And with paint,heck, I've made all those charts, all those mixes, trying to understand the subtle way a color changes as you add other colors- and I still don't know. I still don't know what blue to grab when I  paint this late fall sky, and what to mix with it to make it the glowing, brilliant, non-blue that is is.

Much is about value. A painting in all the wrong hues, and all the right values, still gets it right. Thus we can easily interpret a black and white photo- stripped of color- though no such thing as a black and white world exists.

My eyes aren't so good now, and when the light gets dim, as it does when I paint in the evening,I know I am not seeing what I once saw. I didn't expect this change.  No one told me. I have no idea now what I am not seeing.

I suspect- and know- that if I had a prime time to paint- I am beyond it. It's past. I feel much the same things when I look- but it is slower, more like dealing with something one could never figure out, and now lack the super powers of youth to do so.  I didn't expect that exactly- another surprise.

So I paint what I always have painted. Same things . Cezanned talked about motifs- finding one- finding one's own.  I stick to what I know- and when I think, what else might I want to paint? Nothing comes to mind. Though if I painted 24/7, or even 1/7, I know I'd find a new motif or two.

5 year Hiatus. Back on it. Grazing.

Revisiting this blog, that last time I must have painted was in 2014. I don't doubt a few paintings happened between times- but I couldn't tell you what they were. There are a few on my easels.

But though I think of myself as a painter- more in love with painting than anything else I do- but I know I barely know the bare basics of it all- and my time, if I even had it, has come and gone- it is still the central thing to me. There are lots of things similar- I can find similarities in every thing I love to do-everything that makes me happy- if that's even the word- they all have similar roots.

For one, you don't do this with other people. It's something that is 100% alone- something entirely between you, the materials at hand, your hands, and light. And a conversation running in your head that you can't turn off.

I have no idea how the really great painters did it. I ve read what they wrote (or used to), but I don't see the things I would say. So it makes me wonder sometimes if I am even painting. If I were, someone, sitting next to Constable, out on a river with clouds and trees- would we even talk about the same things? Or a more modern artist- our times- would we have anything to talk about?

Oddly, I think not. In fact, in all my 59 years, I don't think I ever met anyone whom I thought felt the same way I did, or visa versa. My experience isn't broad, so I don't know for sure. To correct myself, there was one time- and odd time- when a painter was excited about my work- and sat in front of a piece- fully focused- and started asking questions. Why is that color there?What's that shape doing? I do that part different...

That sort of thing. Can't recall her name. Totally appreciated her. Don't want to more, lest I realize she had no idea what she was talking about.

I'm writing this now as I painted today. No big deal, but I had to build 20 canvases (16x16), and today I forced myself out to the river. All those years  of experience had a hiatus, and I feared that it would be a horrible disaster.

But in the trunk of my car is a painting. Pretty much like every other one I ever painted. Maybe worse. But not horrible. And all my equipment- the paints, the easel I've had since I was 19, the old army bag,and a (now) empty flask of Port wine- they are all in the trunk of my car right now. Brought home from an evening out.

And a pretty extraordinary and perfect one.  I've lived in this valley for 30 years,  in the area all my life, third generation, and have this feeling for the dark, wet, dripping landscape- that feels like its in my core. That's what I want to paint. And I pretty much think I know half a per cent of half a percent of 1 percent of what there is to know.  I don't have the skills to know how to draw it all out- in paint, or a poem, or anything. Even in a personal feeling, seeing the light a certain way, I feel like I am just grazing the surface.