I have many new paintings from a recent workshop to post, but this week has been really busy with freelance work. For now I'm going to post a musing on plein air painting that passed through my head yesterday while I was watching the wind blow in the back yard. (Yeah, that's what I do when I'm busy.)
When you paint en plein air, you're fighting nature. You're forcing the moving sun to stand deathly still on your canvas. You're taming a flock of shaking leaves into a few swipes of bristles. You're crashing through nature's defenses, striving to own and control a being that is guarded, haughty, and independent, like a beautiful woman being wooed by a man. But sometimes the man, despite all his flailing efforts, can touch on a core of need within the woman, just as somewhere in all the sweat and strain of painting, the painter can find the essence of the scene before him, and nature suddenly acquiesces and beams back at him from the canvas.
Well, maybe I'm speaking for myself as far as the flailing and straining. But if this were easy, I probably wouldn't feel as drawn back to it as I am!
click here for flailing men
(the song is fantastic ... thanks for sharing, Taz!
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