While making this painting I was haunted by the line from Shakespeare: Saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch/ And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss. This line provided the title for the painting and served as a kind of mantra, summing up the design strand of the choreography of hands. The pilgrim's hands were one of the most carefully designed aspects of the work, and each took as long to create as the entire figure. Awestruck by the vision of the sculpture, the boy reaches out to the handrail for support. The trees flanking the staircase also reach out, but towards the monument, as though lifting laurels to an emperor, palms outstretched. The sculpture itself is centrally defined by the the gesture of its hands, the depicted hero reaching up toward a vision of his own.
This is a landscape painted with oil on paper. It was painted from a photograph and the subject is a pond in Central Park. The visual theme is "distance" and all of my choices were made in order to communicate and stress the illusion of space. The painting was made in four layers, with a few days between each one to allow the paint to dry. I am going to describe the process of each layer. STEP 1 The first step is to block in the large shapes. This is a means of mapping out the composition, choosing which objects will be included and which omitted. The exact tones used at this stage are not absolutely critical but are an approximation of the target colors. Since they will serve as a substrate for subsequent layers, I mixed them lighter and duller than my target colors. That way they won't dominate subsequent layers by showing through and altering the color of those layers—at least no more than I want them to. STEP 2 The next layer of paint is
I would like to write about a painting that I have been contemplating, Caspar David Friedrich's On a Sailing Ship . A man and woman sit aboard a boat in a dark ocean headed toward land. The porcelain colored city in the distance is bathed in a soft light. It is close enough to be real to them, but distant enough for the atmosphere to make it dreamy and insubstantial. Look at how the man's jacket ripples as though he were a continuation of the sea. To his darkness (tonally and metaphorically), the woman is the light. He is one with the dark forbidding sea; she, her dress the color of clay, represents land and home and safety on a solid earth. She is perched up hopefully. The man, with slumped but straightening shoulders, looks up at land with similar longing, but as though as at a hope that is less real to him. This dynamic between the characters tells us that she is the greater moral strength between the two. The fact that she is in the light while the man
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