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| 8 x 8 oil Available here Lilacs on LeDoux |
I really
didn’t get it right. I was excited to
find the two beautiful lilac bushes flanking the door near the Blumenschein
Home and Museum* on Ledoux Street in Taos.
I set up my plein air easel and quickly set about painting. After two hours of struggle it was clear I
had a failure. The composition was
dull—one, two, three things in a row.
The middle was a gaping dark uninteresting rectangular door, the wrong focal point--not the
flowers, the whole reason for the painting!
The painting was 95% dark. The
brushwork was heavy-handed. I was disappointed and disheartened. So distraught I destroyed the painting. I had
come to paint lilacs, and, by-gum, I was going to get these lilacs!—just not
today.
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| Photo of the first composition try. |
Of course,
part of my problem, was in not thinking
before painting. If I were to make progress I was going to have to look at
this mistake and find the roots of it. First, I chose to paint the scene from
the most comfortable vantage point (shade and level ground), not from an
interesting composition vantage point. Bad me! Second, so worried about losing the
light late in the day, I didn’t take the time to work out a few small sketches. Finally, had I thought any about what my
teachers had taught me? I went back to lessons on compositions, about light
versus dark, about balancing warm and cool, and about finding some exciting
place for a spark of unexpected color. What was I trying to say in the painting?
After reconsidering these, I went back later in the week. The result is my failing up “Lilacs on
Ledoux.” (top)
A lesson learned
in the hot and dry western land is not soon forgotten. You’ve got to use your
brain when you paint.
Postscript*
The Blumenschein Home and Museum is an appropriate place for a “failing up”, of
making progress as a painter. Ernest L.
Blumenschein was one of the New York and
European trained artists who settled in Taos, NM in the early part of 20th
c and founded the Taos Society of Artists.
Though it was disbanded about the time of the Great Depression, he and
its members are largely credited with making Taos the artist colony that it continues
to be today.
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My paintings are available at Sheffield Art Studio in Cary, NC and online and now, if I have paintings on auction, at Daily Paintworks auctions (see above.)
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