Portrait of October 13 and 16

I spent a chunk of last Tuesday wandering around northern Kentucky near the Indiana border, in search of something around which I could build a painting. This is lonely work. You turn down unfamiliar roads. You make many sketches. You feel every squandered gallon of gasoline.

This sort of rambling looks a whole lot like laziness, unless you’ve tried it yourself. Birge Harrison said that great compositions lie all around us. Maybe. Me, I have to drive around sometimes.

Twenty miles later I wound up at McGlasson’s Fruit Stand in Hebron, KY, a place I’ve painted many times, but where I’ve only emerged once with a decent picture. I don’t know why I keep banging my head against that particular brick wall, except that I love the place, and I love the people who own it. They’ve given me the run of the place for ten years. I managed to do a decent picture there last October, but it was the first good one out of dozens of failed tries. It was mostly a cloudscape, with a little McGlassons to provide context:

This time around, I took a spot near one of the green-roofed buildings shown here, where a little arrangement caught my eye:

One tries to take the arrangements one finds verbatim, but this one required moving stuff around. The first day’s lay-in will demonstrate this:

This roughly painted lay-in, painted over an old, failed canvas, shows how I brought the foreground pumpkins closer to the corn stalks. Whereas the other picture, with the wild sky, was a landscape, this thing is just a still life, painted outdoors. Were this my own property, I would have physically moved the pumpkins where I wanted them. But out of respect to the McGlasson family, I moved them with my paintbrush.

That night, while waiting for Day One to dry, I messed around with the motif in Photoshop to make it more closely resemble what I want the painting to look like. The pumpkins’ job was the function of most foreground objects in still life painting: to draw the viewer’s eye into the picture.

Here’s how to looked at the end of the second day. More scribbly than I’d prefer, but the light effect was pretty good. Someone whose judgment I respect told me to stop. I listened him out.

Anything painted outdoors, whether a landscape, a cloudscape or a still life, is really a portrait of a day of the year, and a time of day. It is never a portrait of a year, because each year brings the same four seasons around, like a carousel. An autumn on 2020 is about like an autumn of 1968; I’ve been around for both of them. But a portrait of October 13 and 16, 2020, is unique to those two days.