The Light in August

Like a magic meteor shower, an energy force has flown through my veins these fast few hot summer days. The August light has always intrigued me, and has ignited my passion for the pigments once again. Like a madman, I have spent sleepless nights in my garret studio painting as if the easel were a magnet, with the intensity of deadline being done by dawns’ light.

Oil pigment is messy. It stains and ruins clothes. Turpentine, which is offensive to some, is an elixir to my smelling sense. Whatever color was used last will hang under the fingernails, and impossible to clean. The pains are worth the pleasure of this incredibly sensual medium. Oil paint feels like silk on the fingers, and possesses the consistency of creamy paste for those who do not paint. Oil oozes, and immediately becomes a sexy medium. It’s difficult to explain why the medium is sexy, as that would require a treatise, but oil paint is tied to my puberty when I first started painting in oil. To me it’s just sexy. Being an artist at twelve was powerful. In the Renaissance, I would have been sent to be an artist’s assistant at that tender age.

My brain sees something in the loose under-painting on the canvas, and my hand picks up just the right brush, and the alchemy of mixing hues together and creating values of warm and cool, light and dark begins on my palette. I have to put down washes of under-color because I simply cannot face a white surface. The subjects have been seascapes and storms. I have no idea if my subconscience is expressing stormy emotions, or quiet, calm ones. Makes no difference to me, as this fresh bolt of light is all about the paint. I have no cares about the image subjects as they exist only in my mind, and only a means to an end.

It is all about the paint. The texture of the brushes dragging and scumbling has been like my hand was driven by an unworldly force, The new large, round brushes have opened a whole new way for scumbling paint. My favorite brush since I was a kid is the flat chiseled number 12. Perfect for almost any stroke. The flat brush allows me to push paint thick like meringue, creating colors of the reflected sunlight shimmer on water, and the light on reflecting cloud forms I have so intently studied this last year. I read that John Constable spent a year of his illustrious career painting clouds. Michelangelo called clouds, “forms without substance.” I sense the enormity of life in clouds, so I will allow these good humors and Aristotle’s Eudemons to pass through my brain to my hands to palette to canvas as long as the gods allow it to last. The September light will look different.