A blank canvas and a blank mind, at least that's a starting point. Though it's usually quite a while before i proceed to the next stage. Needing an image that could embody a quality of beauty that even that word itself is too jaded by misuse to convey.
In a folder of digital photos, rambling roses in my back yard, originally a mere minimal rasp lost in long grass, and nurtured from next to nothing. Flourishing and full flowering, blooming June after June. Seeming suitable i chose to gamble on roses.
Intricacies of small wildish roses in close-up, convoluted and complex to draw with accuracy. A gamble too, to position and compose with all elements in proportion, true to the photo without loss or distortion. So the question arose, how to transpose, the photo eight and a half inches high, to canvas twenty inches high ?
I improvised a solution.
While it could be done by eye, a folded paper's edge marked to match the photo on the screen becomes a ruler. Then folded longways on itself again and again and all divisions equalized. Marked off as twenty equal divisions adjusted without calculation, being proportional equivalents to twenty inches, and translates to
actual inches on canvas.
Sometimes the best method may be no method at all. In sharing, a showing is better. Imagine describing how to tie shoelaces, we'd never get it. The painting went through intentionally distinct stages over a period of two weeks. All totally organic, nothing technical. I confess to never finding it as easy as it may look, and you'd wonder why we do what we do. Aspiring to be inspired and inspire, seems to involve method.
Preceding paragraphs relate to form and procedure. Being just one way to form guidelines for following while also augmenting the weave of idiosyncrasies in the drawing's flow that just happen to be there unintended. Ironically impossible to describe, contrive, name, or even point to. No surprise then, if all these words fall short, when there's no fixed target to speak of. Jostled in a jumble that's a job to juxtapose, just to share the photo of the painting of a rose.
As with a certain specific visual characteristic of free-form flow which to the casual glance appears random and disorganized. Whether you care to call it Tao, or naturalness, a description of which is not the phenomenon itself. Subtlety seemingly invisible to rational sight. Felt with the faculty with which we evoke images in the embers, creatures in the clouds, and facial features within foliage.
Round off this ramble that arose around a gamble on a bramble. Improvising on the most suitable image immediately at hand. Something most structurally suited to epitomize a certain fresh, clean, and serene benevolent vibe.
Demystify and share the process in a way that may be helpful. Using words as an aid to convey elusive but relevant known qualities in the realm of art and perception. Ironically as always, but naturally so, there seem to be no adequately exact words to represent salient qualities so subtle as to be beyond categories of common classification. Which may well be true of almost everything, as is often said, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.
To which i might alternatively add: 'The essence of art is present in heart when he 'the beholder' is absent'. A sentence to contemplate closely. The insight lost in the noise of a busy world, expressed as art. ~
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Martin Rainbowmaker.
