Some artists are observers; others reach into the collective unconscious and search for something like a half-remembered dream.
Every now and then I put a piece back, and later pick it up again to find that it suddenly feels finished. This is one of them; I didn’t want to overwork this little painting, which is a study for a larger and more ambitious piece, as well as my first official work in egg tempera making its way to a real world gallery. (You can also see it in an earlier stage and read about how it began.)
A little dreamscape painted for my first solo show.
The word for this Illustration Friday reminded me of a this little tondo I painted one night some ten years ago. It’s hard to read the text on this image, but it contains a quote from one of my favourite poems by Walt Whitman.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d.
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
I am still working on last week’s Illustration Friday word “depth”, but you can see the work in progress here.