Still Magestic

Often I find doodles in my notebooks that can stand alone as their own painting. In this example, Still Magestic, a butterfly with stained-glass wings is bolted to the ground, unable to fly away. In the foreground is a poppy field (fitting for the day of this blog post), which was inspired by Monet's masterpiece The Poppyfield Near Argenteuil , a small oil painting I saw at Musee D'Orsay in Paris, and I once made a copy of using acrylic paint (which hangs in my parent's basement). The message of the painting is simple, sometimes we want to fly (or our ideas want to fly) and yet we are tethered by constraints of reality (or our bosses). The sky technique used in this painting is a little tricky but very effective if mastered. I start with a pale yellow/orange layer of paint, and let it get about half dry...which means not to wet, not too dry. Then I drop in the clouds, a micture of ceurelian blue (an opaque sky-blue) with touches of yellow and alzarian crimson (a red). If the initial layer moisture is judged correctly the clouds keep a nice tight form, with fuzzy edges. If the layer was too wet the cloud shapes run into each other, if it is too dry the edges are too hard. See technology@pull for a similar example. 

Still Majestic, watercolour 10 x 15" cold press, 2008 (No. 1391)