Lost and Found Dept, Magic at Wimbledon and at the beach

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads 12 June 2019 oil on canvas board  30 X 25 cm

Here is an example of how lost one can become while trying to finish a quick picture in one session. I look at this mess at the top and wonder just how I could have ever found an answer for it. 

From this perspective years later, I can see that I had rushed the picture and I was too anxious, but I also threw too much paint at it and I lost the light. It quickly became muddy with enthusiasm.

But what I think saved the picture, (and me also) was that I was working in the middle of its transformative stage, what I call the 'Bloom', when the colours were changing so rapidly that I believed that I was able to jump into this flow as if it were a fast moving river, uncertain to where it would lead me, but sure of finding an answer. This is an artistic process but one with which I am ill-at-ease because basically I'm a control freak. This is essentially at odds with the artistic process and it’s why I love working at dusk; It’s because I'm forced into movement and into aligning myself along Nature's way of thinking, away from my own.

It's not only being in all this movement and (confusion) but also seeing how Nature behaves, while operating in its manner of operation, as Thomas Aquinas had understood it. To this end I am trying to make sense of it in visually formal terms in order to create a coherent image. 

I like how it finished though I have no idea how it happened. It was way back in 2019, and of course the magic of working like this is that it pushes a painter past his/her habitual boundaries without even knowing how it came about. The only reason I'm writing about this episode is because I made a photo of it, not something I habitually do when out at the dunes.   

But it's July after all, so I'm watching Wimbledon, and naturally I correlate all of this picture-making magic to tennis. It's all a battle, with or without an opponent. It's the art of the craft when it is touched by magic. And I what I learn from both tennis and Painting is that the more one practices these art forms the easier it's for magic to make an appearance.