This is a painting I recently started. It is around 6.5×9 feet. The idea for the painting began about a year ago when I was talking with a family member who told me her dog had died from the extreme heat. I had a similiar experience 16 years prior and the conversation made me look back at the event and circumstances from a different persepective which revealed a lot that I had not realized. So I wanted to make to make a painting that recreated both the experience of participating in something significant and reflection across an expanse of time.
The idea is that the story will unfold through a series of shifts in perspective which continually changes your relationship to the characters involved. The picture is composed of a dog in the bottom left with a woman and two boys directly above. There is a baby to the right of that group and a young girl in profile sitting above. On the far right is a man spraying his head with a water hose.
The painting is in the early stages of its development and I am sure I’ll be working on and blogging about it and a couple of others for the whole semester. I’d like to hear what anyone thinks.
February 5th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
This is simply fascinating–to watch a painting take shape over time. I am intrigued by this openness to process–a kind of willingness to share the art as it takes shape. I have a strange superstition about that for my writing–a fear that by even speaking of the work, I wil breathe out what is uncertain, mysterious, and surprising about it, and thus lose the pleasure of my own discovery or worse, the point of wanting to tell it, having told it already. I am intrigued to see how this particular piece will take shape–the impetus for it is tragic, and there is a potential for the documentary here, but already the composition has a quality of symbolic substance that seems to challenge that inclination already. I will keep looking at these with interest.
One love
KD