Speaking of Art Blog

Dots and Wings, pastel, 11x14"

This is my latest pastel, of a Silver-spotted Skipper butterfly that happened to land on a white hibiscus in my garden just as I was photographing it.  My hibiscus blooms are huge in August and I love getting in close to take pics of them.  There are also woods behind our house and garden, so when I was outside photographing my flowers that day, the sunlight was filtering through the trees and creating beautiful colored dots of light in the shady background.  With the circles of sunlight and the butterfly’s delicate wings set against a bright white flower, the moment felt magical.

So why was this scene attractive enough for me to paint it?  Was it the dramatic contrasts between the white and dark shapes?  Yes, but there was something more than that.  Those dots of color reminded me of a really cool experience I had many decades ago when I was a teenager.

My parents used to drive my sisters and me all over North America every summer as we grew up.  We usually traveled with several other families, all of us pulling our separate trailers and meeting up in the early evening at a series of campgrounds.  We saw so many beautiful parks this way, stretching from California to Nova Scotia and all parts in between.  One night in Bar Harbor, Maine I had an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.  A girl my age from another camping family had been to that campground before, and told us camping friends to meet her with our flashlights and beach towels after it turned dark.  We 6 teenage girls proceeded to walk over a hill on the edge of the campground that separated our trailers from the beach and ocean.  The hill effectively blocked all the light coming from the campground.  It was so dark.  With our flashlights on, we found the sand on the beach and sat down on our towels.  Then our friend instructed us to lay back on our towels, turn off our flashlights, and stare up at the sky.  It was a really clear night, BTW.  At first, we could see nothing.  Then after a few minutes someone in the group started to gasp.  Then we all started to gasp.  One by one stars started to reveal themselves to our dark-adjusting eyes.  It was incredible!  After a few more minutes the whole sky was lit up with stars like we couldn’t have even imagined.  We were witnessing the Milky Way stretched in an arc across the whole sky, clear as ever.  It looked so bright and it was so awesome that none of us could speak.  We just lay there, gazing up, awestruck, mesmerized by all those twinkling lights.  It was hard to pull ourselves away and walk back to the campground.  I felt changed by the experience.

Well, guess what I thought of when I looked at my reference photo for this painting?  Yep, that night on the beach.  So, I had a lot of fun interpreting the background lines, dashes, shapes and circles I saw in the photo.  I added clusters of dots that would imitate the night sky in Bar Harbor, Maine.  

Each of us is truly a condensation of a whole series of unique life experiences.  That’s why we artists all have a unique agenda when we go to render a work of art in our studio.  Our one-of-a-kind collection of life experiences guides us. And that night on the beach is why I loved adding colored dots to the dark background of this painting.  I was remembering the stars.