Groping for a Motif

There’s a wonderful family-owned vegetable stand in Hebron, Kentucky. I’ve wanted to paint it for, easily, the past fifteen years, and I’ve still got a dozen canvases done there that have all crashed and burned. I particularly hanker to do something there as Halloween approaches every year, because the place does a huge trade in pumpkins. The setting and the time of year, for all the splashy color, have a sense of melancholy. The sun is setting. Frost is coming. The merry-go-round is taking us into winter’s desolation.

I tried yet again this afternoon. They know me there, and have even allowed me to roam the place past the end of October, when the stand closes to the public. So I wandered around. In the past, I’ve tried to do something kinda Rockwell. This time I tried to put stories and associations out of my thinking. I walked around until I happened on an arrangement that seemed like a picture could be built around.

A couple of hundred feet from the place, the view seemed pleasant enough. You can’t see it in this pencil sketch, but the receding perspective lines aim towards a line of pumpkins in the middle distance. It looked pretty good to me, but I’d left no room in the sketch for the sky, and I wanted to crop the picture accurately. So I tried again.

It seemed promising. It is interesting how the puffy cumulus clouds of summer disappear almost immediately when fall sets in. The first weeks of October the weather’s been unseasonably hot and bright. Last week it broke, abruptly. Today it warmed up again, and supposedly will stay that way. But the clouds are no longer summery. You’ll see that in a minute. Any meteorologists in the audience? Can someone explain to me why cumulus clouds disappear and Stratus clouds dominate the fall and winter sky?

I still liked the arrangement, so I figured I’d give color a try. I had a cheap 8x10” panel, with cotton canvas mounted thereon.

Forty minutes was enough to get a sense of the color I was dealing with. I still think the setup’s promising.

There is a desperation in fall scenes like this, at least there is when I paint them. I’m not as able to withstand severe cold as I once was, so every bright, warm fall day could well be the last one till spring. At least normal bright warm days. There are bright, warm days to be found in every November, as well as most Decembers and Januaries. But you always pay a price for such days. They may be warm and bright, but there’s usually some kind of weird accompanying phenomenon. Usually it’s crazy wind. I love October. You get it while you can.

I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.