When you’re throwing yourself into a totally new place artistically, it can be rather comforting to go with what you know – and start with the basics. For me, the basics always come back to focusing on the line, a fundamental and founding element of my personal art history. So, my first painting was going to be heavily line-based, inspired by a winter photo I had taken of a shrub living in front of my favorite KFC/Taco Bell on Weber Street in Waterloo.
I’ve enjoyed many a taco in the presence of the shrub, and was always appreciative of its perfectly rounded structure. Also, this shrub, and its surrounding flowerbed, is always one of my favorite places to sit and notice the beauty of the passing seasons.
So I did a line drawing based on my photo of the bush, intending the resulting painting to be dark-shrub-on-yellow-background type of piece – almost a silhouette. The plant figure itself does have color, but the colors are dark, and relatively flat and un-modulated (not shaded or blended). As an experiment, instead of modulating the darkness in the lines of the shrub, I modulated the yellow in the background, going from a yellow-greenish sky toward a sunny yellow towards the base.
I love the radiating pattern suggested by the plant. This painting, ‘About to Sprout’, will always remind me of the time in early spring when the sun is shining stronger, but the plants still aren’t so sure about bringing their leaves out into the open just yet. While I was pleased with the simplistic happy statement made by this painting, the line-work, still, is on the overly detailed side, despite its relative flatness.
This mood of this painting is happy optimism – the future seems sunny.
