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Water pictures

4/18/2012

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Picture
Picture
One of my interests/obsessions has been to try and paint water. Not paint with water(color) but paint a fair representation of water. It’s very challenging – water moves, it’s either transparent, translucent, reflective or all of the above all at once.

Our experience of water is complicated by the changing focus of our eyes. One can focus on the surface of the water, on the bottom of the pool (if it’s visible) or on reflections in the water, which might be nearby trees or as far away as the sky. And a representational painting is a moment frozen in time, with no changing focus. That’s an issue with a normal landscape painting, too, whether you’re aware of it or not.

As you look out at a view from a hill, for instance, as you look at the mountains in the distance, the trees close to you (if you pay attention to them at all) are fuzzy. But as your eye rolls around (it actually jumps around) your brain stitches together a smooth, focused narrative of what you’re seeing. And in a painting, as opposed to a photograph, all those things are in focus at the same time, because that’s how we perceive them. So even the most boring representational painting is abstract in this regard. So a pool of water represents a special challenge, because one has to balance different focal lengths to portray one’s experience of the pool.
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Blah blah blah. All that to explain why, when I get bored painting pictures of scenic views of the mountains I am obsessed with trying to turn out a picture of water that is satisfies what I see, feel and know about water. I haven’t made one yet that I am really satisfied with, but the works above are a couple of recent attempts.
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Back after my leave of absence

4/12/2012

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Picture
sunlit walnut
Well. It’s been an eventful six weeks or so since I last posted anything. I was trying to post something weekly, and things were just too hectic there for awhile. There was work (of the kind that pays the bills) and baby goats and lambs to catch, and then udders full of milk to keep up with, and the taxes to be filed. My first time doing them for myself. Thanks for the help, Larry. 

Also, the weather was beautiful in March! Warm and sunny, things blooming too early, grass growing! It was too much to ask of myself to be inside at the computer or even in the studio. I moved some big rocks, planted some fruit trees and did some long-postponed landscaping work. 

I won’t bore you with the goat baby pictures here, if you want to see them, go to the Facebook page. The painting above is one of my favorites from the winter painting blitz. There’s a spot on Turnpike Road here in Rockbridge County that has a great view of Green Hill, so I often stop there and get out on my way home. This time, the sun was just about to set, and over the hill on the other side of the road was this beautiful walnut tree in a pasture, and the angle of the light was just stunning. I took a very bad picture with my cell phone, and came home and made this painting very soon after. Sometimes less information is better – I’m not inhibited from making up the details or enhancing the color, trying to re-create what I experienced. If the picture is a good one, it competes too much with what I remember. Memory is a very slippery thing.
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    Jennifer Cox is an artist working in Rockbridge County, VA. She shows her work regionally, sometimes nationally, but not that often. She works in virtual isolation, so if you want to leave a comment, please do! Just try to be kind.

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