Paintings of Time and Place

The Final Step: Completion of "Just Tall Enough"

 

The final step in creation of this painting.  Where do these images come from?  A friend tells me that this image reminds him of comic book covers from the 50s and 60s.  I lived during those decades, but was never enamored of comic book covers.  The image does remind me of a sci-fi fantasy which I just finished reading:   A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin.  A wonderful fantasy to pique my imagination and the creation of more phantasmagorical paintings.  By the way, this book was published in the late 60s.  Could there be a correlation between the series of Earthsea, comic book covers, and my painting?

Just Tall Enough, Oil on Canvas, 20" X 16" (image size), framed, $800 USD

                  SOLD

      

 

Related articles

Tales from my Ursula K. Le Guin Bookshelf: The Earthsea Cycle Part II

The Next Step--Where Will it Go?

Next Step in Creating "Just Tall Enough"--Getting Close to Finished

Another Step in Creating "Just Tall Enough"

 

A friend described this painting as a throw back to the 50s and 60s sci-fi comic book covers.  I lived in the 50s and 60s, but never paid much attention to comic book covers.  Ray Bradbury has been one of my favorite sci-fi writers, especially his book The Martian Chronicles.  Of course, I read very little sci-fi so who knows where these faces came from?  Who knows what is stored in this magnificent computer we carry with us:  the human brain?  So much is stored at this time in life and so much is available to us in the nuances of every minute's processing of the world around us.  How could articial intelligence even begin to create what the mind creates?

As I looked at the previous post, I saw the traces of a second face in the upper right hand corner.  Why not make that more pronounced?  So here is the resulting sketch with the second face.  I don't often sketch before or during painting, but this composition called for this drawing which began to define the final painting. 

 

Still More to Come Re:Just Tall Enough--The Next Step

 

The painting process is magical to me.  There must be an unconscious place where the accumulation of experiences, sights, sounds, and more assemble and mull around to finally emerge into some sort of ultimately definable  image.  The process of arriving there is one difficult to describe.  False starts, reinventions, covering up and painting over, relishing a tiny part of the canvas that piques more or just "is" for its beauty--the list goes on and on.  Culling out parts, adding parts, changing colors, finding a new place to go.  There comes a point as I paint that the direction becomes clear, but only after much deliberation and playing around with paint on the canvas.

At this stage, I begin to add more color, more definition of what has appeared as a face, and the hint of a second face (to the right).  I added a defined vertical line and began to think more about the composition of the piece in general.