Last month, we drove back from Hot Springs heading south into the Flats as the evening light cast long shadows across the meadows and lit the mountain ridges in deep blues. In that moment, I decided to paint that view using a 2- by 6-foot canvas I had originally stretched for a Delta scene. I scouted a location at Fox Town Road and then went to the studio to rough things out using a brown monochrome scheme. The next day was a bicycle race that passed through the Flats. To work on a painting this wide with so heavy a stretcher frame, I had to load up and use my studio easel, so I went out early to set up ahead of the racers. As the cyclists passed by, I took photos and a few videos so that later I could add them to the painting. The cyclists waved and gave thumbs up as they passed me, and I returned the gestures. It was a cheerful moment, reminding me of the waves from the shipyard workers on the tugboats across the channel in Coden, Alabama.
I switched to a monochrome blue as I began the scene on site. It produced some vivid passages of color, making me wonder if it was too much to hold together. Keeping the right amount of those early perceptions is valuable, something I often don’t fully appreciate until I reach the end and realize something was beautifully captured and then whittled away. The mountains at first were an ultramarine blue intensified with some cerulean blue and alizarin crimson. The lines of trees were a very sweet set of greens that nicely played off the violets. The foreground had a nice yellow-green with rusty red undertones peeping through. Before the cyclists appeared I saw a young deer in the field and quickly sketched it in with charcoal.
I came back later that day and saw the shadows stretching across the meadow. I worked on these and experimented with ways to differentiate the foreground trees from the mountains behind them. I had a few visitors on this day, including one of the neighbors across the street and some of the residents of Fox Town Road. I began to worry that I was getting bogged down, so soon into the project. I was recalling a line from Picasso In His Own Words that went something like, “The beginning is the most important part of painting, afterwards, it’s already the end.” (Of course, I couldn’t find it and instead I saw a contrary quote -typical for him- “Nothing is worse than a brilliant beginning.”) Part of the dilemma of this painting was “correcting” the color after the initial perceptions which too often kills the color or the color plus the gesture of the paint stroke.
Early on, a woman stopped and asked me for directions to a local college where a puppet convention or symposium was taking place. We visited a bit. I thought, what a wonderful line of creativity puppets are, especially how they mainline directly into a child’s fantastic imagination. This made me remember puppet creations of Klee and Calder - both so wonderful.
While I waited a few days for the painting to dry and the clear weather to resume, I did a few sketches of the cyclists to get a sense of how they were constructed.
Next, travel to Mississippi interrupted this piece for 10 days, and on my return, I was further interrupted as we adopted a large old standard poodle. When I got back to this piece, I wanted most of all to get the middle of the painting completed satisfactorily so I could let all that dry and then put in the cyclists. I worked on the stone buildings housing the community center and the line of trees on the right. I worked right to left, showing the character of each of the trees lining the road in the foreground. This stage below has perhaps my favorite state of the mountain ridges.
I let all this settle in and then tightened up the mobile home and house on the right. At one of the last site visits, I was working on the sky and to stop it from dripping onto the mountains I turned it upside down. A nice fellow pulled up to chat and said, hey, your painting is upside down! I replied, went to college didn’t you? We laughed and he said he was also a plein air painter who was moving down here from New York. After he left, I got a clean and mostly uniform sky in place and put it aside to dry.
Back at the studio, I looked again at the photos and videos of the cyclists and put in a group of three. It continues to amaze me how fine a brush needs to be to carry enough paint to work but provide the fine line required for work at this scale. I made do with what I had, but one day I will find the right combination of brush and paint to get that fine work done right.
One more pass today to take into account things I noticed while putting down this account. I deepened the near ridge to a darker blue, reinforced some of the colors that had washed out in earlier stages, and painted a better deer. So here is the antepenultimate provisional final state, subject to further revision at any moment….
antepenultimate
penultimate
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