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| gallery « Millcreek Meditation | |||
 Millcreek Meditation |
Millcreek Meditation
A still life filled with light Price: $750 Description: We love walking in the Susquehanna river hills. I knew I wanted to do a painting some day that captured the feeling I get walking through their dappled light when the rhododendrons cover the hills. However, until a happy accident occurred, I never was able to capture what I wanted to portray. Then our digital camera one day distorted a whole session's worth of images: each "photo" became an oddly tinted collage of many images. Normally, I paint fairly realistically. It's the point of view (physical or psychological) that that makes me call my style "reality with a twist." These damaged photos helped me to step into the world of figurative abstraction, with a nod to cubism. Inspired by them, I divided the canvas into squares - giving each gently mottled section its own related, but unique, color scheme that would move viewers' eyes across the painting and imply diagonal pools of light cut by a streak of bright sunshine. On top of this, I placed images I wanted to feature from the hills: flowing water, rhododendrons, as well as other vegetation. I simplified the shapes and abstracted them by fracturing them through the use of color: changing the images' color each time they passed over the paintings different sections. It provided a real challenge to choose colors that worked together harmoniously while allowing my figures, when needed, to pop against the background. I loved the idea that doing this helped me make transparent something I believe is true, which is an object's history (i.e. underlying structure) affects its form (as our personal histories make us who we are today. I love this piece, so I thought I should make it part of series, but it took me years to get the courage to do that. I have recently started to do that, with underwater topics. To see how this work has evolved, look for me to post the following recent works: SWIM!!!, School, and Reef. |
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