Chasing Home Series: #5

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Number 5 in the series. Subconsciously I think I knew the series was winding down when I was working on this one. It’s done on a 1“ thick plank, and it has a very different feel than the previous ones I think. It’s about 11.5” wide by 9.75“ tall, and it's very heavy. I’m not sure what kind of wood this is, some kind of plywood with a thick veneer on it. It’s a left over from one of my dad’s projects. This is a green project!

This was the first time I used the self-drying clay for the large areas instead of the polymer clay you have to bake. It took a little getting used to (hint: keep it wet, because it dries FAST). The air-dry clay was used to make the little islands of land and the moon. I used wire for the trees, left over houses from #4, and polymer clay for the fence, light bulbs and bird. The light bulbs are ”hung“ using black thread. And as usual the tissue paper and gel medium to cover it all.

The theme of this one was choices. This one was just for me, not for art group. I had been thinking a lot about a time in my life when (in retrospect) I had come to a metaphorical fork in the road and had to choose how I was going to deal with something that had happened to me - whether I was going to choose to go right, and make the healthier choice, or spin off to the left. I made a conscious decision kind of late in the process that I didn’t love the picture that was beginning to form in the painting: that either choice was all good or all bad - so I hung the lightbulbs in the trees on the ”dark“ side and put the raven on the ”right“ side, just to balance it out.

I had a lot of trouble with the ground on the dark side. Initially the whole left side of the painting was dark, and I was envisioning a deep forest, but after I painted it, it just wasn’t working for me. The trees were too dimensional I think, and I just had a really hard time integrating them into the background of the ”forest.“

So then on my way into work one morning I was thinking about this painting and that half of the painting specifically, when a flash of white in the grass on the side of the road caught my eye. At first I thought it was a bird, or at least it had the shape of the bird, and that started me thinking about the color white and how it can be cold, and somehow, that translated in my head into a snowy scene for the trees. I tried to balance it out with the white of the sky on the right.

I’m still not sure how I feel about this painting. Sometimes I really like it, especially when I look at it up close, but then sometimes I think it’s a little....boring, compared to what I had in my head. I couldn’t frame it because of the wire from the trees, I didn’t flatten it enough so I couldn’t fit a frame around it. Maybe that contribute to the feeling of incompletion I get when I look at it. To be honest, at this point I think I need to put it away for awhile and get some perspective back on it. It was substantially larger than I normally work, so I spent a lot of time on it. I think I need a break from it.