I Heart Painting

Temporarily fed up with making feather quills – the ones that write best are the eeny-weeny ones I made out of duck feathers before I knew what I was doing. The larger feathers are too flimsy. Granted I didn’t temper them before cutting as I probably should have. Guess instructions are there for a reason. 😉

Despite the frustration of not having any tempering equipment handy I refused to let the capricious Muse curb-stomp me. I faked hard left and chose to explore one of the other ideas I have for Survival Games: paper relief diorama/stage settings. This particular idea appeals to me – the notion of paper dioramas has been in my mind since seeing the exquisite paper mockups of stage sets in the Paris Opera House over a decade ago. It means cutting most of the void background off of the originals, but I’d be OK with that if the results are what I’m looking for.

I was hoping to find a nice, cheesy postcard landscape scene to put behind the figures (possibly the same one in every piece). In the end I went with a gray-scale forest scene, one from a photograph I took last fall at Vimy. The forest, grown atop the shell-ravaged battle site, is other-wordly and the landscape affected me deeply. The painting is about 70% complete:

I think I’ll do another in full colour to see which I prefer.

Not sure if this idea will pan out, but I think it has potential. If nothing else it has given me a few ideas for new work. It also felt damn great to be painting.

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