October 18th & 19th, 2016
Loon Phoenix Rising
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 30 in

Not a Plein Air! I worked on this one rainy day and one sunny day. I attempted a similar painting a year ago and I was not pleased with the result. There’s something about the light and water my mind needed to work out, so I tried it again. Again my focus has to do with creating the illusion of glowing light. If you use a paint brush, the dynamic is a lot easier to create because you can blend and grade your highlights & shadows gradually. With the knife I’m working with planes and slashes and daubs of paint. The starkest contrast you can get on a canvas or a piece of paper is between black and white – but in spite of their being polar opposites, white on it’s own & in contrast with black doesn’t look expressly like “LIGHT.” Even in an Ansel Adams photo, you have the precipice of contrast but no sense of RADIANT LIGHT. The qualities of warmth, grace, beauty, benediction, life-force, joy – to me, those and countless other dazzling adjectives are what I see in light. That’s what I’m trying to paint. The secret and the key I know lie in colour, but also in the energy and motion of a moment.

Incidentally, I do see this as a sort of phoenix, and identify with it as such – particularly as this phoenix is rising up out of water and light rather than ash and fire.