Bird Painting Continues- Day 17

Heron 2, 8×10, oil on gessoboard, $112 [button link=”http://www.dailypaintworks.com/fineart/denise-hopkins/heron-2/215731″ type=”big”] Buy Now[/button] SOLD

Yesterday’s post is still resonating with me today.  I’m no longer ahead on my paintings so the ones I post are the ones I’ve just painted– which makes it tricky because I’ve sold a few still very wet paintings I’d love to ship but have to wait.  So much waiting lately.  Like watching paint dry.

Egrets and herons are still, quiet birds.  Lurking.  My sister-in-law sent me a picture of an egret she spotted on her vacation in the Florida Keys and said it made her think of me.  I’ve got so many paintings on the to-do list, but after her text, I knew I had to paint another bird.  The chaos requires it.  I need that type of stillness, that quiet disregard of everything that is not fully, actually present.

Prufrock’s in this one too although I mostly smeared out the words with short vertical lines– I was thinking of rain but not the kind that turns things grey.  The kind that seems to magnify rather than deteriorate color.  Everything these days is riddled with that kind of contradiction and, sometimes, darkness.  But I can feel the sunlight creeping up, making sense of what I couldn’t see before.  And the season is appropriate– good Friday tomorrow.  Good Friday always yields to Easter Sunday, and I’m going to paint birds until the dawn breaks and I no longer need them.

I’ve included a few images of this one in the works.  These paintings rely so much on brushstroke that they are freeing and scary enterprises– one misstep and the spirit is gone; one accidental but fortuitous stroke and the painting is alive.  It’s exciting, intuitive, therapeutic.