Day 1. I Will Arise Now and Go

“Bee-Loud Glade” 12×24, oil on canvas $300.00 [creativ_button url=”http://www.dailypaintworks.com/fineart/denise-hopkins/bee-loud-glade/436649″ icon=”” label=”Buy Now” colour=”red” colour_custom=”” size=”medium” edge=”straight” target=”_self”]

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
    slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
    sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Day 1.

It starts with Yeats. A desire to retreat into the notion of painting as ritual. Painting as personal growth. Painting as discovery. Painting as an invitation to the muses to go ahead and come on. I’m ready. Although I’ve loved painting at weddings more than I could have imagined, and I’ve mostly enjoyed a nice healthy heap of commissioned work, the daily paintings have gone missing. I’ve been painting, but I’ve also been procrastinating knowing that today would be the day I launched myself back into my retreat of daily paintings.

Some retreat.

It is fraught with frustration. In preparation for this month’s paintings, I made a list of subjects and ideas. One of my goals was to complete or redo some older paintings that have been collecting dust. With Eliot’s “and yet time for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions” echoing in my head, I went for the painting I most wanted to “re-vision” this time as that sort of retreat from my busy life into which I’ve idealized daily paintings. Adorned in optimism, I started off strong only to get lost in messy globs of what I intended to be a “bee-loud” glade. Eventually I settled on the fact that my Innisfree would not be bee-loud but rather bird-loud and attempted to paint an actual one, a pelican, diving, as I imagined the sound the water would make if hundreds of them were plunging into the water in a kind of feeding frenzy.
It didn’t work. I longed even more for my own “Innisfree”. I scraped off the pelican. Eventually I even attempted an eagle. But this, ultimately was a birdless painting. One more representative of the buzz of the sounds they might make if I were in a peaceful place– one I hope to be closer to by my 30th painting.