marciahillart

Mary Oliver, in her poem “The Ponds,” says “…what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled……the light is everything.” I am increasingly drawn toward painting light in its various forms. I have a number of paintings that focus on skies: “The Happy Couple,” “Late-Day Grace,” “Thimble Peak Sunset,” “Gateway,” and “Sumac” are some of the more recent. Skies and clouds seem to me to express spirit, although light in other forms (“Softly, Softly” is an example) can depict spirit as well.

My two most recent paintings are expressions of light, each in a different way. “Mary’s Field” is a painting of a friend’s pasture at dusk.

This was a challenge to paint, because the contrast between the light in the sky and the darkness of the misty foreground, already in silhouette with the growing dusk, made photos inaccurate. Here are the reference photos:

As you can see, the first photo darkened the foreground to the point of entirely near-blackness, while the second lightened the sky to the point of washing out its beautiful colors. My solution was to borrow from each while keeping the contrast of the trees against the sky. I lowered the horizon a bit to emphasize the sky, even though this puts it near the center of the painting, which is Against The Art Rules. I also decided to emphasize the angles in the field slightly, to help lead the eye toward the sky. I added a faint scumble of lavender and peach to the foreground mist to unify the painting’s colors.

This second painting is “Portal.” My cousin Max Hinz is a photographer, and when I saw the photo of this scene I was so taken with it that I immediately asked for permission to use it for a painting.

Here I needed to do something similar, adding a bit of light and color to the near landscape, which was in almost total darkness in the photo. I used an underpainting of dark red in the shaded areas, which shows through in places, to relieve and contrast with all that green. I varied the greens, adding more light to the closest foliage in the bottom left. And I carried softer versions of the red underpainting into the tree trunks in the sunlit area and even a bit in the road.

Composition is tricky with a painting like this, since the focal point is diffuse. Of course, there is the circle created by the light. But can you see the faint slant of light starting near the top left of the road and going diagonally up from left to right in the sunlit area? This brings the viewer’s eye to the leaning trees in the upper right, which then encourage you to circle back down to the road.

I like this painting very much indeed; it seems to me to say something not only about light in the visual sense but also about being drawn toward increasing the light in one’s life. May we all be pulled toward such an increase!

It’s a good idea — and fun! — to try something a little different every once in a while, in art as in the rest of life. I started my most recent painting with this photo:

It’s hard to say what possessed me to take the photo. It’s a completely unremarkable scene, as you can see. Perhaps there was something about the half-hidden quality of that small meadow. Maybe it was the angle of the hill. There seemed an almost magical quality to it. But how to express that? I tried, with the computer, making the image much more green:

Much more alive! But this still was not quite what I wanted. It lacked mystery. I tried for more of a blue-green distortion. Here it is:

This was more like it. Look at this compared to the first photo. It has a very different feel to it, something closer to what moved me to take the picture in the first place.

I started painting, and got the bones of the painting down, but continued to feel like there was something more I wanted to express. I was not sure what it was or how to do it. When that happens, I have to let the painting sit for a bit until I know the next step. Often, in this situation, the puzzle of the painting stays in the back of my mind, especially when I am going to sleep at night. So, one night, I suddenly imagined the plants and bushes in the foreground with more sinuous shapes. That was it! The next day, I started painting again. Here is the finished painting:

Look at the movement in the foreground plants and bushes! To carry through that feeling, I also made the tree leaves curly, though it’s hard to see in the photo. I held to the blue-green emphasis, although I put more yellow in the lively foliage to draw attention to it even more. I created more contrast in color and between light and dark, since the original scene is fairly uniform in both areas. The dark shadow under the far line of trees is even darker, making that hill shape more prominent, and the shadows in the near leaves emphasize and echo the movement of the shapes. I made the birches more prominent, since they are an important structural element in the painting.

I titled it “Green Fire.” Those foreground bushes look like flames, don’t they?

This past week I did a four day painting retreat with another artist. We set up in my home, painted from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, then just left our stuff there for the next day. I had anticipated becoming exhausted and overwhelmed by this: painting is very demanding. Usually I can paint for perhaps three hours at a stretch and then need to stop. I had even purchased a big bag of peanut m & m, guessing that there would come a time when we had to lie on the couch and eat them before we could manage to paint again!

But in fact it was fine, and I even wished that we could have extended it for another two or three days. Amazing. Some of that was the company of another artist, someone with whom to consult (“does this look right?”) and complain (“this is hard! this isn’t working!”). Although I think that much of what is helpful about painting with another artist is just to be in the room with another person who is engaged in a similar process and struggle.

I made a number of new paintings, and I like all of them. Three are pastels; here they are:

 This is “Softly, Softly,” a portrait of a particular dawn. I was so attracted to the soft pinkish sky and mist, with the silhouette of the trees and bushes.

 “Winter Brilliance,” a painting of just that: one of those sharply clear winter days when both sky and snow glow with light.

 And finally, “Gateway.” I thought of the name of this painting when I took the photograph for it, as occasionally happens. The trees framing the morning looked like a door to me, opening into the day. I love the image and the concept.

My painting companion sometimes works in acrylics and brought her acrylic painting materials for me to try. It was so interesting to use a completely different medium! It handles very differently from pastel, of course. Perhaps it was a matter of my unfamiliarity with the medium, or the distance provided by using a brush instead of my hands, but I found myself making somewhat more abstract and bolder images. Here is the first:

 I named this “Holding the Sky.” I put the tree in first, using an image of a local tree for reference. Then I put in the sky, or what I suppose passes for sky. It certainly is not like a “real” sky! As I painted the sky around the branches, the daubs of paint went over them in places, creating a sort of jagged effect. While I had assumed that I would re-establish the branches, I found that I liked that rough quality very much and mostly left it.

The next painting was the result of one of those inexplicable artistic impulses that one gets. I almost always paint landscapes, but I suddenly decided that I wanted to paint the aurora borealis. I guess that’s a landscape of sorts. Here it is: light in the sky mirrored by the water below.

 This image in particular is a departure for me, but I do like the mysterious quality, just as the aurora itself has a mysterious quality.

All in all, a successful four days, I would say! I will definitely try it again. It was not easy to protect my time, even for only four days. I may be retired, but it is amazing how many claims there are on my time, things that need to be scheduled or time-sensitive things that need to be done. But it can be done, and is certainly worth it. I learned that I have more creative stamina than I thought I did. I learned that I like acrylics and that while they will have a certain materials-based learning curve, an artist is an artist and brings that sensibility and knowledge set to any medium. I learned that I can put my life on “pause,” more or less, for a few days and immerse myself in the flow, the demands, the struggles, the satisfactions, and the occasional gifts of creativity.