EVOKING AUTUMN.

So, how did there come to be a new painting titled 'Evoking Autumn', seeming sufficiently satisfactory and successful in and of itself?

It was four months or more since the previous painting, also similarly preceded by a long gestation period apparently devoid of any suitable potential ideas.  While in a larger sense creative potential may be infinite, somewhat paradoxically not just anything will do.

I could improvise abstractly or in a mode where it's possible for 'anything goes' to perhaps resolve into something significant.  There is always an abundance of profoundly sensitive and infinitely diverse abstract art in the world being created continuously and much that i appreciate.


Yet i mostly tend to make images related to what can be easily identified so as to be entered into, having an aptitude for evoking form, spatial distance, and light, and abstract qualities are concentrated in colour, tone, organic patterning and subtle attention to integrated brush-work.

Not knowing what to express can be very challenging, more so than it used to be perhaps.  Especially in the absence of a social role or other significant mode of activity.  When i have something i'm motivated to work on, immersion in the spontaneous use of a brush is a familiar mode i naturally enter into.


It's not a hobby and i've never regarded it as such and so have never had a use for that word.
Likewise i'm not an amateur artist neither am i professional these are just categories i don't relate to as i've simply continued what comes naturally ever since i could hold a pencil or a brush and the category most related with that is probably human.

So inspiration can't be forced or faked and i just have to wait.  Hardly something you can make a nine-to-five out of.  I dismissed a lot of ideas till a particular photo clicked, thankfully as i wasn't sure if anything ever would for reasons too subtle to describe.


There are criteria, admittedly of my own choosing, relating to the intrinsic significance distinguishing a conception from a cliche and determine if it's a suitable structure for feeling and the feeling is in the flavour and the elements of form and colour and the characteristic touch of brush to canvas

So having waited long in not knowing when or even if for the right moment which always turns out to be now.  Going ahead with loose pencil lines mapping out and adapting image to fit.  Minimal crayon touches to indicate colour, darkest areas filled methodically with black paint and diluted linear washes of same to fortify contours.  Using one bold and pointed brush throughout wielded delicately and wand-like in my most meditative element one with the process.


Wanted it to last longer so as to have that activity to focus on which was unfolding very smoothly and contemplatively quiet.  Yet still came to completion in five or six sessions of afternoon and evening.  Continuing till long after midnight by electric light at a table by a flickering fire and dark chocolate whereas two years previous i would have been smoking 
instead.

Anyway, this is no 'how to' lesson, just a desire to share beauty with some depth, and harmony in a world of harm and money.  There are no superficial tricks or techniques other than what you are free to invent or discover or otherwise stumble upon, and who am i to tell anyone or anything how to be uniquely herself, himself, or itself?


Besides, on a beautifully abundant but barbarically backward planet microcosmically one-with boundless vastness of unknown infinity (aren't we all?) with its insanely orchestrated wars, cultures of corruption and commerce, artworks are sold for prices in hundreds of millions while simultaneous millions are being rendered homeless, stateless, hopeless without food and water and those who've lost the plot literally call the shots and we wish it would all get better overnight while some get rich and famous for predicting it will.

So by contrast as a healing counterbalance and with the best of intentions attentively managing to manifest an actual artifact of unstained intrinsic benevolence integrating random traces and touches of refinement accumulating to a density of richness visually equivalent to an illuminated vision of good news shared freely, and call it 'Evoking Autumn'. ~

~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker

(Appreciative comments welcome.  Click on title heading.)

GROUP OF LUPINS.

Meanwhile momentarily emerging from many more moons or months of minimal motivation.  Wondering what to paint and why for want of any potentially incendiary incentive to move to make a mark or spark of inspiration.


While well aware the wide world with its wilful wanton ways wild words and weather and war and more the unsuspected invisible tricks and traps all fall for.  Aware the world already overflows with endless arts beyond imagining in huge halls in all cities of the world, how then not be daunted by diversity ?

Wondering what to paint and why, being currently occupied with clipping hedges and grass by hand using an old pair of clippers with wobbly handles, (a brand new pair didn't work on grass at all). I don't use lawnmowers, strimmers, or any power tools, and am averse or allergic to noisy machines so it's a job to keep it in order and when weather or energy levels allow.


Crouched and clipping one of two small front lawns, i paused to look at the lupins proliferating in many large pale pink blooms.  So i went and got the camera and some shots of potentially paintable compositions especially close up.  A subject seeming suitable for a particular kind of brushwork  and to being an image in its own right, something more than just depiction, a subtle but important point.

A painting on canvas 20" by 16" completed in three stages smoothly without niggle or struggle within the space of a week. Pencil drawing stage 1. Working from photo on computer screen, being the most challenging phase requiring a lot of measuring or checking the relative distance between and proportions of shapes so it all fits and with tones indicated so the drawing is complete in itself. Which explains why it can often be hard to make a start.

Stage 2. being simply the tones of light and dark, meaning areas of shadow, along with clarification of form and contour. Defining form so it stands out three dimensionally as volume relative to direction of light source. Integrating the overall structure, sculpturally and no 'tricks' involved but certain optical principles, it's about depth.

Stage 3. Colour clothes the form with feeling. Colour is not merely decorative, it's a relational radiance relative to its context. A frequency or vibration on a spectrum inclusive of all degrees of blend and gradation. As such, its relation to areas of feeling is one of subtlety and precision, density and luminosity, radiance and substance.

In a certain sense the point of the painting is not just its likeness to anything, but its actual vibe, its feeling vibration, as with music. So a lot of focus goes into mixing the exact hue and tone of a colour and in its relation to other colours.

Unfortunately i find that digital photography and digital technology so often falsifies certain colours and changing the source of light won't necessarily correct it, and it changes the whole feeling.  A prime example here being the blueish tone of the wall, which in the actual painting has more of a subtle hint of violet in it 
and a slightly deeper tone which works better within the whole.  You get more the colour if you look from an angle below the screen.  So much for the unquestioned quote: "A bad workman blames his tools", sometimes tools are faulty.  Never trust a blind robot.  You can quote me on that.

Here's the painting under electric light.

  It gains on the wall and loses on the lupins.

All these finer points are aspects of an intent.
The painting is basically a conscious focus and application of positive energy. Being a creative response to the undeniable awareness that the degree of corruption throughout what we call 'civilization' can be more accurately regarded as madness. Which is obvious to the degree that one is aware of it. 

Regarding awareness, we don't know what it is we don't know. We tend to not want to discover what we don't want to know. Understandably. But ignorance is not bliss it's just delusion, liability, and we can't afford that. There are things the nature of which we need to be aware of.

So this is just a sharing glimpse  of something i needed to create as a hopeful counterbalance to let's call it 'the other stuff' going on in the world. A focus on harmony, balance, sanity, benevolence.  No big deal, an uncomplicated, unpretentious beautiful vibe, something to share.  What else to call it but 'Group of Lupins', and meeting the challenge of another thirteen letter title like all the others.  Actually not unlucky as we've been misled to believe due to the date the Cathar inquisition was staged, but apparently a higher octave.  I suppose the lupins really do resemble a group of radiant beings involved in conversation. ~

 

     ~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~

  Martin Rainbowmaker

P.S. Any layout errors solely due to unaccountably temperamental tech, a 'preview' device that lies erratically, and a long struggle with a malfunctioning mouse.

PLANETARY DAWN.

I confess to being at a loss for words of relevance to having just completed a new painting.  What else can i say?  Only because of never knowing if, when, or how such might happen again despite intimate familiarity with the process.  Hard to explain that it requires a specific motivation rather than to just be produced to order.

The universal collective rising groundswell urge to manifest a planetary dawn of humanity the self-evident source of inspiration for that which simply wishes to be expressed and the discomfort involved due to its being subject to oppression.

So why paint, but to participate in a process of patterning transformation which has as much to do with refined sensitivity of touch as with anything else, most often to the point of almost imperceptible whispers. 

So, in needing this activity as a sustained therapeutic focus i chose to take a chance on an image almost abstract in consisting of a spatial arrangement of flows of colour and tone while still evoking a recognizable realm and essence of benevolent radiance.  The challenge of how to make something out of next to nothing.

As shown in the photo, how else to start but by making a loose approximation as a foundation.  Then you've got something to work with.  You don't just get there in one step necessarily.  It's a process of modifying, enhancing, altering, augmenting, emphasizing, adding to or taking away.  As with carving or sculpting, except with painting you can always put it back. 

It's always a shock how different a painting looks depending on the light, whether electric or daylight.  Working late into the night it can seem complete, with colour and tone, dark and light, warm and cool in the intended balance.  Then later by daylight it may appear to be more of a washed out bland nothingness or some other imbalance, and hard to know which is the correct balance.

That of course happened with this painting, particularly as it's predominantly atmospheric without objects. Especially how certain colours registered when photographed. The digital camera amplified certain colours and tones relative to others, falsifying the actual relationships. It's usually difficult to get an accurate photo because a painting consists of subtle and precise relationships.However, modifying the painting accordingly in the fourth session  evolved into a harmonizing and integration of all areas.  A rhythm of intuitive and restrained touch.  Idiosyncratic minimal modification in silent mind mode of meditative attentive immersion.  Envisioning dawn in dimension of depth and distance in the eye of imagination.

Waves of deft dabs deepening density, raising radiance by blending boundaries.  With squinted gaze and tweaking numerous nuisances of anomalous nuance moving more towards mystic majestic but who would even notice?  Momentarily standing rapt brush in hand then just let it be.  Planetary dawn?  What other kind of dawn is there?  Well it makes 'yet another' thirteen letter title.  ~

~~~  ~~~  ~~~  ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.