June 2022

From early days when I began to draw and paint, I discovered the link between the act of creating art and the subsequent insights and inspirations that start to present themselves in the world around us. I am sure every artist knows the mysterious phenomenon of which I speak. After a period of time immersed into painting practice, a transformative event takes place in the brain and suddenly you find your awareness of patterns and colors, light and shadow is significantly enhanced. Just walking down a sidewalk or driving down a road, one will start to notice the world in a very different way. Something jumps out, catches the artist’s eye and demands to be observed. I suppose we all have these experiences seeing something interesting that elicits a visual response, but it is the unique task of the artist to dissect the reasons why and put those reasons to use in the creation of a painting.

“What a beautiful photo my friend, Gary Lloyd, posted to social media,” I said in my head. The Cahaba River near Trussville is indeed Mother Nature’s work of art. But the composition of the photo especially reached out and grabbed me. There were definite swirling shapes within the leaves of the trees and the changing reflections they created as they interacted with the reflected sky. There were patterns of cool shadows and warm light and a mysterious darkness as the water rounded the bend around the sunlit sandy shoal. I was enticed to pick up a pencil and post-it notepad in order to decipher the composition and see if the simple “notan” value pattern would hold my attention all on its own. I think it clearly does.

The value pattern held up. Now, what about the color? My idea was to underpaint with a “temperature painting” following the process of Julie Hanson in her book, Fire and Light. Reds and yellow for the sunlit areas and and blue for the shadowed parts. Some of these vivid primaries will show through in the final painting to play with the viewer’s perception as well as enhance the harmony of the underlying pattern and influence the final color temperature.

With the goal of an impressionistic style, I began to lay in notes of color as I observed them in the photograph, slowly building note by note and pushing the color and values I observed to create an intensity that enhanced what was already observable in the symphony of color that exists in Nature.