Catching Some Rays...

graphite & watercolour/30x20cm

A sunny Sunday morning offered the opportunity, for once, to represent a pair of pears as described by a direct source of light, thus providing broader areas of illumination than usual, the challenge being to respond to the fugitive nature of such as the sun moved around the sky during the course of the drawing & painting process, constantly reforming the objects & recasting the shadows & reflections - & the (inter)play of – as it did so.

As ever, one is engaged in The Struggle with the passage of time & the changing nature of the light source, even more so under such circumstances than with the fading light of dusk, the resulting watercolour being the record, a sum, of the sequence of decisions taken & revisions made during the process of observation & responsive mark-making in the endeavour to (re)present a cohesive, & coherent, study.

As might be expected, with the light flooding in to the scene & reflecting from various surfaces, the picture appears, at least in general, somewhat tonally lighter than the habitual results of such compositions.
The pale blue upper half of the picture plane (for once completed) acknowledges – celebrates! - the presence of the bright sky & thus, atypically, might suggest the existence of something, perhaps a sense of space, beyond the hermetic arena of the still life arrangement as habitually depicted: alternatively, as this wash ‘fills in’ the void that usually appears above the ‘spatial continuum’ of objects & grounds as drawn & painted, at least in this seasonal sequence of still lifes of the pears, thus forming a more familiar pictorial rectangle, it might build up the ‘wall’ behind the objects & consequently serve to close off any sense of recession into deeper & imaginative space!
Nothing is fixed or stable, either prevailing environmental conditions or meaning…

Soundtrack:

Lambchop 'Is a Woman' & 'Damaged'

Another pair, this time of magnificent albums, perfect accompaniment to the Sunday morning drawing & painting process.