Snagged

I was weeding out my hedge of wild roses (Rugosa...the alizarin crimson ones) and I was caught, literally and visually, by the thorns on cluster of buds.  So beautiful...the fresh green...just a little bit frosted, and the way the sepals curved around the crimson rose bud and terminated in a flaring tip.  There was something else as well....

"I have to paint it," I thought, or I'll never figure it out. So last night I painted a water color of it....held it back and squinted, and said to myself, "that something is missing."Then I noticed the edges of the sepals were a thin line of buff white.  So I brought out my gouache titanium white and painted a narrow line of white along the sepal edges.  There, exactly!  And yet....there still was something else.

I put it aside and started on my drawing for the new series of murals, and then it occurred to me.  The buds reminded me of those sumptuous Scalamandre tassels; the wrapped round knobs of gleaming silk at their tops, before the threads spread out into fringes.

There are two points to this.  One is how nature and the material world renew and shape our designs and art, and the other is that I'll miss all this if I don't stop to draw/paint it.  Photography, well maybe....but  a camera shot doesn't always demand the long careful looking involved in drawing and painting.

As birdsong , banging on a can or the sound of cars in the rain can extrapolate into music, the visual correlations of a flower bud, a crow feather, or  a flipflop are there to expand into art if I take the time to look with drawing and painting.

Comments

[Tim Colman]

Lovely. Thanks for posting this art.

[Soto20Enid]

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