Immortalized

Acres Edge
Unfinished
14x11" Acrylic on Canvas.

I woke up in one of my foul, (or black), moods yesterday. Who knows why… something I ate before going to bed? dreamed during the night? falling barometric pressure or moon phase? Who knows.

Emotions… they come and go - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - and sometimes don't even have anything to do with what's really going on in life, though you'd think so even when they don’t, eh? they can be so damned immediate and persistent sometimes.

Anyway, when I'm in one of those moods, I know enough to keep a lid on it - not inflict them on the others around me. I also know enough not to work on anything important, because, well, no matter what I'd do, it wouldn't be good enough and then I'd just get madder and start making even worse mistakes, getting wound-up tighter in the process.

So it was that I set aside the painting I'm currently working on and 'paged through' the canvases I'd started but left unfinished. Yeah, I know. I do that… start things I don't finish.

Well, not like that... What I mean is sometimes you can start a painting and after a point know it's just not worth the effort anymore - it's turning out to be crap and you wouldn't want to put your name on it. So, rather than throw good money after bad, so to speak, you set it aside hoping for some future inspiration on how to rescue it; or, failing that, you can paint over it and start something totally new and different.

Of the six canvases with that fate in store, I ran across this little painting, (above), of a spot just north of town where a row of small, basement-less bungalows butt-up against farmland. A few days ago, I remembered, I'd past that same scene thinking that a small tornado'd taken out everything except the three houses closest to the highway, trees and all. I remembered I'd thought I must of been mistaken, until I saw that painting again. There it was, the scene semi-permanently recorded in paint, just like it used to be. I hadn't intended to do that, you understand, painting it only because of how the sunlight hit the back-ends of those little shacks. But I did. There they were and they'll never be the same again.

I heard second-hand from my partner that one of the men I'd painted was all jazzed and stuff that I'd painted him. I just didn't understand why and said so. "What's to understand?" he suggested, "you've immortalized him."

I guess I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, (maybe a lot) - because I still didn't understand, at least, not until I saw that odd little painting I was holding in my hand.

Cheers!


In real time: Thursday July 5, 2007 - 07:31pm (CDT)