A Star is Born

Last year I spent three days on the picture below, only to abandon it after realizing that I couldn’t make it any better. Its big problem was that it began as a picture about the ground plane and ended up a picture about the sky. And, unfortunately, neither ground nor sky thrilled me much.

The question “What is the picture about?” never bugged me as much in past years as it does lately, perhaps because until recent years I was struggling to just get a readable image onto the canvas, whether or not it held any kind of pictorial unity. But the 2018 picture just wasn’t sure what it was about. This wasn’t for lack of planning on my part. I made sketches, I revised them, and I went at the canvas with what I thought was a coherent plan. Yet while it’s good to make plans, it’s even better to make good plans, and one may not be able to tell the difference between good plans and poor ones without actually beginning to translate them into paint. This one was lousy breaking out of the gate, and it resisted every effort I made to make it better. It happens. It’s no fun, but it happens.

Short of a composition that thrilled me, I was subject to the vagaries of the light and atmosphere of the three days I spent painting the picture. The first two days the sky was clear and bland, and I focused on the ground. The third day the sky was cloudy and swirling and dynamic, and I repainted the sky to suit. Suddenly the picture’s raison d’être became muddled. You can find my blog post, “The Fine Art of Upstaging” if you care. At the time I concluded that the sky upstaged the picture on day three, and that this was just fine, that it’s nice to be ready to improvise. That’s fine, except the picture sat in the attic for a year, and I couldn’t stand the sight of it.

Last Friday, I spent the afternoon scouting for paintable vistas, and wound up at McGlasson’s Fruit Stand in Hebron, KY, a place where I’ve spent many hours and many failed canvases over the years. I love the place, but I’d never managed to find a motif there around which a satisfying picture could be built. I hadn’t tried going there for several years. But it’s October, McGlasson’s sells an awful lot of pumpkins, and I’ve always thought an October scene at McGlasson’s could be a scaffolding upon which a comment about the changing seasons might be built. I blogged about this a few days ago, but I’ll go back over it now.

This is a pencil sketch of what I thought might work as a composition. I’m standing so far back that any people who might wander into the view were bound to be very small. The whole concept of pumpkins was likely to be either entirely invisible or very understated. What it was, however, was a fruit stand underneath an October sky. There is more gestalt in one October sky than can be found in many acres of pumpkins.

The little note I made to myself reflected this. “Stratus Clouds” are the wispy, somewhat nondescript clouds that characterize every season except summer. They’re easier to paint than cumulus or cirrus clouds, and the Friday sky was overhung with stratus clouds. Maybe I wasn’t thinking critically enough; stratus clouds aren’t nearly as interesting visually as cirrus or cumulus. Maybe a sky-dominated picture should have had a more elegant rack of clouds. But that was my decision. I had a cheap 8x10” cotton canvas panel, and I thought I’d try sketching the scene in color.

So there it was, my plan for a fruit stand under the October sky. The little black dots surrounded by yellow are dying sunflowers. The reddish passage on the left were pumpkins. I wasn’t sure exactly how I would go about painting the field of sunflowers, but this was my forty-minute rumination on the scene, and I decided that it had passed the audition.

The following afternoon I returned, and found something entirely different wafting over my motif.

Cirrus clouds. I don’t know what makes ‘em tick, or why they’re seldom found in summer skies. If I remember my meteorology, they’re much higher in the atmosphere than cumulus clouds, and instead of water vapor, they’re composed of ice crystals. (If I’m mangling this, please speak up.) Why they are so characteristic of everything but summer, I have no clue. Stratus clouds tell a similar story of the end of summer and warmth, but they’re nowhere near as thrilling to the eye as their cirrus cousins. I took this picture earlier on Saturday, while watching my granddaughters playing soccer. But the sky show went on and on into the afternoon.

Here’s how they looked when I got to McGlasson’s that afternoon. And suddenly that rather uninteresting Friday sky had been replaced, like the aging diva in All About Eve, with its understudy. Suddenly my picture had a star.

So I went at the 16x20” canvas with considerable gusto, wanting little more than to record this magnificent rack of ice-crystal clouds. The lay-in took about an hour. Lisa and I had a dinner engagement that night, and she called me to ask if we could accommodate our guests’ schedule by showing up a half hour earlier than we’d anticipated. This worked to my advantage. Had I spent another half hour on this thing, I might have noodled with it too much.

This afternoon I was able to make it back to the scene. The incredible cloudscape was long gone, but between what I’d managed to grab three days earlier and the snapshot reproduced above, I was able to finish the sky. With what lay before me, I could describe the ground plane.

That ground plane isn’t as finished as I would have liked, but looking at it now, several hours later, I am forced to conclude that this is a good thing. A picture can be about damn near anything, but it dare not ever be about two things at once. A clearly drawn ground plane would have competed against the iconic fall cloudscape. Clearly, this was not a picture of a fruit stand with clouds above. It was about clouds hanging over a fruit stand. Specifically the sort of clouds that signal the end of warmth and the onset of winter’s desolation.

The changing of the seasons is a story I yearn to tell. I think it is a story upon which all human beings thrive. Life is a merry-go-round, not a conveyor belt. All of us, aware of our own mortality, crave the cycle of the seasons. If the Lord tarries and death will someday stalk us, at least every twelve months we still get to see desolation overtake the world around us, and then we get to see it all reborn. It’s a simple reality which speaks to us all, and it’s the essence of the story which every landscape painter seeks to tell: life, death, and rebirth. In the telling of that story, this rack of clouds took center stage and became the star.

Oh, one more thing. I had no stretched canvas upon which to paint this scene. I took that 2018 picture, the one whose star never really took center stage, and painted over it. The late Richard Lack counseled that every painter must be his own curator. I agree. In two sessions, I managed to tell the story of McGlasson’s Fruit Stand under the cold October sky, bring some unity to the motif by allowing that sky to take center stage, and was able to hide forever my 2018 failed picture under this new image.