A few months ago, I introduced
my plan to occasionally turn out a painting in a proposed series, "The Colourful Past." My goals are to put my fascination with old architecture into paintings, to work in a semi-abstract manner, and to be adventurous with colour.
I've just completed the second in the series which yielded, along the way, many serendipitous moments, in the vein of the phenomenon outlined by one of my most important "virtual teachers",
Mary Beth McKenzie:--
While an initial concept is important, you must allow a painting to take its own course. It will grow in stages and each stage, or your reaction to it, influences the next. A painting has its own existence and reality, and you have to follow its needs, making changes freely. Often these changes take you in another direction, opening up new possibilities that are sometimes more interesting than your original idea. You have to allow a painting to evolve. (- from A PAINTERLY APPROACH, Mary Beth McKenzie)
My initial concept was based on the similarity of three neighbouring houses just around the corner from our IGA. Each of the three adjacent houses has a curious 4-windowed eave in the front of the roof, and I've been fascinated by this set of triple triangles.
The same hand -- or like-minded neighbours -- must have been responsible for transforming these boxy old homes into carefully maintained minor showpieces, painted in what might seem to be improbable colours. I've wondered if these colours were inspired by Vancouver's
"True Colours" program, which promotes heritage house paint colours. The city partnered with a commercial paint manufacturer that produces commercial house paints to match the colours of paint chips and fragments that a heritage advocate painstakingly scraped, layer upon layer, from old buildings.
I set to work on my layout, finding that a Purdy's Hedgehog box made a perfect template for the triangles.
This was a rather nice heritage synchronicity since
Purdy's Chocolates is one of Vancouver's oldest purveyors of fine yummy stuff!
Working along (with occasional thoughts of those Hedgehogs -- but the box was empty!), I got as far as replicating the houses' fascinating colour schemes. Originally I'd thought that this, along with a textured background that lightened from bottom to top, would be enough.
But something, or maybe a lot of somethings, was lacking. Hmmm. Those fascinating window panes. What would they reflect in reality? It was here that the painting began to take on a life of its own. Spending time with my own reflections, I remembered a quick sketch I'd made in late summer of the colours of the dawn sky.
The three houses face east. Why not let them capture this reflection, with sky colours similar to the house colours?
Trying for a somewhat "realistic" treatment of the reflection travelling along each triangle's four panes, I was struck one morning by a happy synchronicity with the cocoa-brown of the lowest triangle: the conclusion to one of the great poems of one of my favourite poets,
Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I've always chosen to view -- and read -- him as a pantheist rather than the Jesuit that he was.)
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can feet feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
With the series of four panes full of reflections, I took one more step, perhaps a risky one. With thoughts of those bright wings, I decided to place the dawn sky -- the sky that would evoke the reflections -- in the background. The day I made this decision, I concluded my early morning studio hour and went outside to put out the trash barrel. There above me was a confirmation (as I chose to see it) that my risk was worth it -- a stunning rosy-fingered dawn of the kind JT and I enjoyed through all the clear days of November.
Here's the final painting "Dawn: Three Neighbours on Quebec Street" (with its
evolution here)
I'm starting to plan and prepare paper for the next in the series, as well as for my next still life. Another day dawns in the studio...
...and I couldn't resist one more plunge into these colours -- taken November 25/2013 with the last quarter moon just visible in the upper right quadrant.)
