Third day’s painting
I got an early start on this day’s work. The morning light in my studio is congenial to this piece, and so I managed about three hours of painting.
Keeping the water moving is an ideal that I always try to realize. In every way I know how, I want a sense of life, to avoid that ice-sculpture look of “frozen” waves, and I think it’s a design problem and a seeing problem as well as a knowledge problem. It’s one of the reasons I’ve avoided the use of photography in my paintings. The wonderful stories of painters like Frederick Waugh and Charles Woodbury, who would take themselves out in storms or lash themselves to the decks of ships, all that crazy stuff, to indelibly impress the movements of the ocean into their minds, is pretty inspiring.
I’ve got a good handle on where I’m going in the painting, and I think that it’s expressing some of what I’m hoping to convey. As I get more involved with the various sections, I’m keeping that eliptical movement in mind, and I’ll need to practice restraint where I might be tempted to overstate and hang the eye up. Paint, scrape, and paint again.
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