Welcome back!
I have a confession to make. I have issues with, umm, large canvases. Large canvases make me uncomfortable. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy viewing large well-executed works, I just don’t care to paint them myself.
It’s about control. (Isn’t everything?) When I’ve painted on larger canvases I feel that the canvas is controlling me and not the other way around. (All that white space!) Although there are always happy (and
not so happy) accidents in the course of a painting, one needs to feel some sense of control, some sense that the final outcome is at least partly self-directed. I haven’t always felt that way about larger canvases I’ve done.
It’s about placement mostly. The defining moment of a painting happens very early on. It is actually the first few strokes that greatly define the work. Those early strokes place the main elements or subject matter in thier positions on the canvas. There are no hard and fast rules but some sense of balance is desirable. That is, balance
without bilateral symmetry. Having one side as a mirror image of the other is generally not desirable but yet one doesn’t want all attention directed to one side. It is a delicate balance. And one that I’m not always able to achieve.
So recently I’ve continued painting on my little 8×10 or 9×12 canvases, master of all that I survey. And I suppose that’s why I feel comfortable, it just seems so manageable.
So I’ve made the decision to confront this head on. I’ve shifted, for now, away from the Sedona, Arizona painting I wrote about doing in the last installment to a large canvas depicting a structure I recently had the opportunity to view and photograph in Cape May, New Jersey.
Cape May is “America’s oldest seaside resort”, a pretty town at the southern tip of New Jersey. It has more than 600 Victorian structures within one square mile. We recently made one of our periodic visits.
Below, I’ve included one of the photos I will utilize in this endeavor. I’ve actually painted this very same house many years ago. A photo of that small 8×10 painting is also seen below. It has been hanging in the boran2 boy’s room for some years now. I showed him the house in Cape May but until then he had hardly taken notice of the work. It is of note that the house is not particularly well placed upon this canvas. It is probably a little too far to the left. (Like the artist!) And it is located to close to the top.
Based upon our recent visit to Cape May, I’ve decided to paint it again and on a larger scale. At the bottom is a photo of my starting sketch. The canvas measures 16×20. There will be a large tree to the left of the structure as seen in the photo of the house. There is more to be drawn below the structure as well as the area to the right. You’ll see it’s progress in the coming weeks.
