The green canoe

This here's a story about composition more than anything else. So many times I'm looking for a scene that is doing something new for me. Always looking for that something different, not sure the why of it. Might be one of the many reasons I'm not rich and/or famous, I'm not big on repeating things. The artists who seem to get the most recognition are known for the one thing; a softly painted girl on the couch, the antebellum streets of Charleston, the towering majesty of the western mountain lines, the still life with weird stuff, or the golden sun cast lowland coastal marshes of the 910 area code region. I'm not that smart. By the way, I made a gentlemans bet that I could work the term scatalogical into this blog (which doesn't mean what I thought it meant), so there I did it. This scene, again with the digressing, is something that appealed to me because it had a compositional thing I haven't done much of, the "tunnel". If you've read Edgar Payne's Composition of Outdoor Painting, page 120, you'd know the tunnel. It's one of several basic motifs that he used and wrote about, along with the "S", the "O",  Steel Yard, cross, triangle, "L", three spot, the triple Lindy, the flying dutchman and the dirty sanchez.  That's a great book by the way. Filled with tons of pertinent info and lots of pictures (many in black and white) of sample paintings and drawings. Very informative stuff. Kind of stilted writing but great info. So, anyway, there I was, looking for something to paint and I saw this hole in the trees that lead to a center of interest, or at least a secondary center of interest... the green canoe. I'm not sure that this is one of those paintings with a true center of interest, it's more about the idea of looking through a tunnel of trees to something just beyond, partially obscured. And I liked the idea of crowding the view and trying to make sense of the dark tangle of trees and branches. I like it. Not sure if it's "sellable" though. I'm told that shouldn't be a consideration, unless, of course, you need the money. Oh and speaking of trees, Budget tree. They handled the tree removal from my roof  (see following post).... friggin awesome. Didn't leave so much as a leaf on the ground.