Sophie's Choice

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 May 2024, oil on canvas board, 

30 X 25 cm

This from last week, the only one from the evening because I lost the second one due to impatience. I think in seven years here I've only scratched out three disasters and the third one was last week. It was a beauty until it wasn't and it quickly went to CODE BLUE and it couldn't be resuscitated.

Failures are tough to accept but they teach me lessons each time, and to be fair, there are lots of these studies I've killed over time when I realised that they weren't very good anyway. Of the thousands done I think only a small portion are any good. The real lesson is whether or not I'm improving over time. If I'm just making photocopies of what's already been done then I should give up today and just go play piano. 

Though I know this motif is super simple, with few difficult drawing problems, it's still challenging to create an interesting version each evening. This is all about colour, pushing the foreground into the picture plane and back toward the horizon line while at the same time, bringing the background up to the front using the sea and sky both instantaneously. One can easily stuff all this up. 

 

But I do like this one though even if it meant the loss of the second one like in Sophie's Choice. 

But anyway, we are rolling into winter skies now that begin to bloom uncontrollably like bashful nuns at the sight of a handsome priest (and unabashedly pink!) 

It's been raining all over the Southern hemisphere for months now and bringing catastrophic consequences for tens of millions of people on several continents. Brazil has been hard hit especially. A friend just returned recently and told me that his family had lost everything while at the same time fools in America say that Climate change is fake news. 

I'm grateful I live on a hill here in Australia.