Going for gold?

 

 

 

 

Well, er, not me.   I'm the non-sports fan who hopes to slink away unnoticed after dipping my brush into this puddle of iridescent gold and iridescent copper.

 

But there IS a game of my own invention that I like to play – though it's not as much fun since we began to wear masks and my local adventures became limited to short trips to predictable destinations.  The game consists of this:-- On any trip I take outside the house, I try to mentally store three images and later, from memory, reproduce them in my sketchbook.  The three "catches" I aim for are:  (1) An interesting face; (2) a figure in costume; (3) a figure in an unusual pose. 

 

For example, when I accompanied a neighbour to the bank, I noted this attractive young woman in the line-up.  She was dressed entirely in black, with such an array of stuff hanging from her belt that I thought maybe she was from a nearby construction site.

 

I resolved to make a painting on a small canvas, trying to capture the black garments and experimenting with a suggested technique for beginning a face study – plunging the shadow side into darkness.  I placed the figure on a stool, outside a window, thinking of the title "Waiting in the Cold" – maybe for her booster shot?

 

Before starting, I'd realized that the standing pose of my sketch would itself have little interest.  And despite about four sessions' work on the pose and its setting, the whole thing quickly became boring.

 

Let's chalk it up.  It was a pretty dumb idea, and I began to paint over the whole thing.

 

By the time I'd returned to the studio the next day, though, I'd decided that that was the coward's way out.  Seriously: I had a compositional puzzle at hand – how to make a strong vertical shape interesting – and I ought to give it another shot.

 

I know!!  I'd add additional vertical shapes and aim for some interesting connections among them.

 

As I looked at the blank space above the figures' heads and thought about this second try, a new title came to mind:  "At the Second Chance Café."   That gave me scope to "activate the space" as my original life drawing teacher would term it. (OMG - that was 40 years ago?!!)

 

Here's the final version.   

 

You can see that there's a little more movement and variation in structure – triangles, diagonals, a semi-circle. 

 

Although these two gals have come in from the cold, I think they're still waiting for their coffee to be served.  In fact, this production is only slightly less boring than the first try.

 

As I've observed before, sometimes a canvas seems to have a curse on it.  I'd painted "Second Chance" on top of a less than inspiring painting from almost exactly a year ago:  "Another Dark Day at the Zodiac Café."  It seems this canvas just cries out to be painted over again and again.

 

Well, there's nothing for it but to fuel up with coffee again tomorrow morning and move on to my next event.  Let's let Winston Churchill sum it up:--

 

"Success is stumbling from failure to failure

with no loss of enthusiasm."