October 1, 2019 – Bewitched by beauty

Fascination – 29″x29″ – Watercolor on Paper

Inspiration and energy to make these watercolor paintings have been relatively steady resources in the past dozen or more years. I have a folder of “candidates” – photos I’ve taken that have given me the message they are worth spending my time on. Most of the time when going through this folder, looking at all these beautiful pictures, I can imagine myself jumping in to start painting pretty much any one of them. My problem is not having enough time.

But after finishing “Aria” in July, I was fresh out of something to paint and a look through my candidates left me totally flat. I spent 2 or 3 days digging through the rest of my image library looking for something that I may have overlooked. I never know when something from a while ago will reach out and grab me by the throat (ok, by the heart) – as it did with both “Sherose” and “Lavish.” Even there… nothing.

The thoughts were scary. Uh, oh. What if the inspiration well has run dry? What if I can’t paint flowers, fruit – all the stuff I’ve loved to paint for two decades – anymore, then what?

Then I went to my friend Samantha Davidson’s. Sam gives the most heavenly facials on Earth. On my way out the door, all tension drained from me, I saw this amazing faceted glass bowl, about the size of a cantaloupe, on her dining room table. It had a single stem of a pink hydrangea in it. The way the squares of glass caught and reflected the light, all the colors and iridescence! My gosh! It HAD to be painted!

Sam happily lent it to me. I came home and found a few things in the garden, waited for the sun to dip a lower in the sky and took several dozen photos. It felt great to come alive, to have something I couldn’t wait to paint!

Before and after the photoshopping work.

I let myself pull out all the stops in Photoshop: use the image with the most colors in the pieces of glass, and then add in a few more; use the one that had a break in the flowers to keep it from being too heavy, add a leaf at the top to carry the eye skyward, and of course shift the colors to give myself maximum joy.

As I watched myself paint the glass itself, I realized how important it is to really paint what I see. The grid-like, linear aspect of this would make it really easy for my left brain to jump in and “organize” it all. In order to make it look real and alive, I had to let the uneven borders, bending lines and diminishing sizes and proportions be as they were, in order for it to really live.

Painting while camping at the Russian River!

Our Tahoe vacation was busier and more distracted than normal, so I came home having made very little progress and with a fire under my butt to get it finished in time for the Sausalito Art Festival. I took it on a camping trip in mid-August and even painted it on the picnic table in our dusty Russian River campsite, by (LED) lantern until well past dark. I was determined to get it done!

Somewhere in the last couple of days working on it the title sifted in. The root of the word “fascinate” in Latin is connected to “spell” and “witchcraft.” When overcome by the hunger, the need to paint something like I did this one, I do feel bewitched. That the word “facet” has a similar sound doesn’t hurt either. Here it is – meet “Fascination.”