Painting buildings isn’t really my thing but this week for some reason I just HAD to paint a straight line! I ached to paint lines! In painting landscapes there ialmost never an opportunity to actually draw something. You have to pick your path carefully and above all, NO LINES! Mass drawing only which is a painterly way of saying ‘fudge it’. Nature’s lines are far more subtle than our cubes, rectangles, squares and board-straight corners. In painting the landscape, the rule sounds something like, ‘nature abhors obviousness, conspicuous lines are rare if they appear at all, and if you want to paint lines then join a highway crew’! Not quite but you see what I mean. I’m a lover of line.
Save for the human voice, there is nothing so expressive in all the arts as line. Color? That’s an exercise for the intellect. I never really struggled with figures or portraits because of the lines! Very discernable. Depth is rarely an issue to consider and if you only look every 10 minutes or so that’s ok, because the model and the lighting hasn’t changed. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been working so hard at landscapes. It’s by far the most challenging for me. But I digress.
So I duped myself into painting a building this week. Just one. I think this is the first straight line I’ve drawn in 3 years. Oops, I did include a telephone pole in a piece earlier this year. But other than that, I’ve been steeped in landscapes and the varied, alike-but-different patterns the natural world piles in front of you when you go to depict her.
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