Speaking of Art Blog

Song Sparrow, pastel, 12x12"

This is my latest pastel painting.  It stretched me.  I was having a bit of an artistic inertia problem a few weeks ago during the last days of winter.  Nothing was grabbing my attention to start creating at my easel.  I often find this happening as the long dark cold winter days linger on.  So I bundled up and went for a hike at the Great Marsh in the Indiana Dunes National Park.  Most everything was brown everywhere I looked, but nature always surprises and motivates me to dig deeper on drab days to find its less obvious treasures.  Looking for something to photograph usually puts me in a mindset to do some creative exploring, so I had my camera ready.  

I wasn’t finding much until I was heading back to my car.  There in some thick brush alongside the trail was a cute little Song sparrow minding its own business, completely ignoring me.  I took several good pics as it flitted around on a few branches.  As I glanced at the images on my camera screen I was awestruck, but why?  I consciously pondered that question as I drove back home.  I mean, it made no sense that that little scene would be inspiring to me, yet it was.  I wanted to paint it soon while it was fresh in my mind.  But what besides the cute rust and white bird was so interesting to me?  Apart from the bird, it was mostly bare brown stems and branches, layers and layers of them.  Why on earth was that breathtaking to me?  I decided I had to answer that question before I could attempt a painting of it because I needed to know where I would be going with it.  I do not like the idea of leaving home without a destination in mind.

The very next day I found myself wandering through a local florist shop just to pass the time and to see if I could muster up some artistic inspiration….again.  My previous day’s question had not been answered yet.  I view a florist shop as a part of nature also, but with a little more structure to it compared to hiking outdoors.  It is tamed nature.  Works for me to find inspiration sometimes.  Just as I was getting ready to leave, I saw a stunning wall hanging created with some fake succulents and vines secured to a large flat piece of wood.  I loved it, but why?  And that’s when it hit me – it was because the vines were curling around outside the bounds of the piece of wood.  Aha, that’s why I was so breathless when I viewed that sparrow on the branch yesterday.  The wild cacophony of branches and stems were curling and poking around outside the picture plane of what my camera could record.  Their layers were seemingly endless and the bird near the center anchored the scene and elevated it to a brief jeweled moment in an otherwise drab sea of brown insignificance.  The bird apart from that background would not have been captivating to me.

OK, so I knew what took my breath away, but how was I going to convey that on a flat surface?  Then it dawned on me to have the picture plane end and some of the branches and stems continue.  I had already attempted that concept a few years ago with my painting titled Winter’s Palette, but just in a few small places along the outer edges.  Hmm, what if I have branches going out beyond the picture plane on all 4 sides, and what if I made the painting square to accentuate its pushing of the boundaries in all directions?  Yep, now I was excited to try it.  I was ready to go big with that idea.

Winter's Palette, pastel 

I decided to include tons of minute details in the confined restricted background area so that the minutia back there would actually lose its importance in all its high key busyness.  Then the sparrow automatically jumped forward because of its strong light/dark contrast, but also because of its saturated coloring.  But the icing on the cake that gave the whole scene depth and pushed selected branches and the bird forward was when I stretched the boundaries of the picture plane and allowed some branches to break free of the confines of the background in all directions.

This whole project stretched my artistic boundaries as I stretched some branches past the background’s boundaries into the white of the paper.  As I worked on it, I felt the drab cold inertia restrictions of winter melt away.  Spring had arrived inside my psyche.  Now I’m back to having too many painting ideas and not enough time to create them, a much preferred problem to have.