Mustang

The heat and humidity of summer are a small price to pay for its dazzle. I chase after it, but it can be elusive. I am suspecting that the more closely one tries to nail drawing and value, the more the splash of the sun hides away from the brush. One might liken it to taming a mustang. Such a creature must be tamed if it’s to be of any use, but if this work isn’t done wisely, one risks breaking the horse, rather than simply taming it, and in so doing losing the very qualities for which a mustang is so prized. Once a wild horse is broken, it can never be unbroken.

And at this point in time, the same seems to be true of me, and of paintings which should be nudged toward completion with daring, with wisdom, with a sense of poetry, and with a willingness to accept that things might be better accomplished in ways one has never before attempted.

The first session of this view of a beached houseboat had the dazzle of noonday sun, captured in a way I don’t think I’ve ever captured it before. I gave the scene about ninety minutes of work, straddling high noon. The shadows of the boat, particularly its underside, are luminous. The values of the shadows are very close to the values of the lights. Was this actually the case? I’m not certain. I worked from dark to light, and what you see here is what I came up with, with no editing. And, at least in my own case, editing is an absolute requirement: until the canvas is covered, I can’t accurately judge whether the notes I put down are the right ones. Absent any re-evaluation on my part, this was a statement, made rapidly and uncritically. The editing would take place the next day. Unfortunately.

Can a picture really be keyed this high? Was this a legitimate use of the three scales — of light to dark, of warm to cool, and of muted to saturated color — from which the painter fashions his illusions?

Looking back, I must conclude that I accidentally got it right the first time, and nevertheless decided to improve on it. It was one of those cases in which the truth stared me in the face, but I refused to believe my own eyes. This thing may have needed some neatening up, but its hue, value and chroma were the best description of blinding sunshine I’d ever blundered into.

I snapped a photo of the scene. Perhaps this was a mistake. The photo was certainly an improvement over the crude first day’s painting, but cameras don’t do well with capturing the glare of bright sunshine. I hate to venture into cliché territory here, but while the photo captures the way the scene looked, it entirely missed how it felt.

I baked the painting on the dashboard of my truck, and a few hours later, scraped it down, so to prepare its surface for a second day’s work.

Here is that second day’s work, done in practically identical conditions. If the drawing’s improved, the scintillating color of the original is gone. I don’t hate the picture, but the qualities which so excited me the first day are gone.

I should have remembered the old saying: If it ain’t broke…

So I went back a few days later, under similar sky conditions, and give it another shot on a fresh canvas.

So here’s Day One of the second try. The dazzle of the original’s first take is still gone.

Day Two. The dazzle’s still gone, and I’m not sure how to get it back.

What’s the moral of the story? I guess one ought to think very carefully about what one wishes to accomplish with a picture, and perhaps give consideration to stopping altogether on the first day, even if the drawing looks ragged. I would dearly love to have that first day of the previous incarnation. But in the sunsplash days left to me this summer, maybe I can grab a few dazzlers, and not break them, as one risks doing with any sort of wild mustang,