Sassafras leaf

10/11: Sassafras leaf, oil on canvas panel, 4x5 in.

My daughter loves to examine leaves on the ground. This one I took inside with me because it was in decent shape and the deep red was great. I'd seen this type of leaf a thousand times and not known what tree it comes from, so good thing we have a Trees Fandex Family Field Guide. Big kids would have fun with this book and its die-cut leaf shapes, which make it very easy to match our most common tree species (the annoying thing is that the pages catch on each other).

I wished I could capture all the subtle colors on this leaf, or at least make a translation that conveyed a fraction of the complexity that I saw. But I could go nuts trying to do that, as I felt I might when I went over the same area for the fourth time to get it "right." So, on the other hand, I wish I was able to simplify a leaf (the way I possibly could with a fruit) down to the point that all surface nuances were left totally to the imagination. I guess the idioms I use in translating could be better at times. Here the main challenge was balancing the dusty purple in the center, which I played down, and the seemingly hundreds of hot and cool reds throughout.

Eddoes

10/7: Eddoes, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in. NFS

We stopped by the Asian American Food Market yesterday (ah, that fishy smell on a hot day) to get some sambal and browse around. I saw these things labeled "eddo," and picked them up not knowing what they were, thinking I'd torture myself later by painting their strange texture. It makes me think of an armadillo (or some ringed bug I might have seen), almost scaly, kind of furry. I played up the warm and cool tones within the browns, hoping not to break up the form too much. This was about two and a half hours.

Eddoes are a small variety of taro root (Colocasia esculenta). Taro, though the word is Polynesian, originated in India or Malaysia(?) - not China as the Creole dasheen ("de Chine") suggests. Its cultivation spread to China, throughout South Asia and eventually Polynesia, and west to the Mediterranean and Africa. Slave traders would later bring it from Africa to the West Indies, and the word "eddo" apparently is derived from one or more West African words. According to harvestwizard.com there are more than 200 varieties of taro, though not all cultivated. It has been cultivated for 7000 years, and is believed to have been harvested in New Guinea 30,000 years ago!

The taro plant is related to a Caladium and likewise may sometimes be called an "elephant ear" because of its large leaves.

Magnolia leaf

9/19: Magnolia leaf, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x4 in. SOLD

At first this seemed easy. I felt I understood the twisting forms well enough and didn't think the foreshortening would be hard to deal with, but of course it turned out to be quite a little challenge. While painting these leaves I kept Bruegel in mind - in a few places I thought I had managed to touch on that simple quality that he had, but most times not.

Sometimes I imagine how Bruegel would approach something, he and his thin paint. For him it was a matter of delineating some shapes and filling them in, which is maybe why many of his great crowd scenes are just complex arrangements of simple shapes (or simple arrangements of complex shapes). This is after all what kids do, before being taken in by brushwork and paint build-up and various other art school pretensions. Now, Rembrandt is a god and I love a thick brushstroke as much as the next guy, but "lean to fat" doesn't have to mean "lean to obese" - that is, paint build-up doesn't have to be the goal of all oil painting just because Rembrandt showed us his way. How many painters are out there who can do a good job and are totally unconcerned with brushyness? In my humble opinion, the simple falling of light on the cap or the sleeve-folds of a bagpiper in Bruegel is at once earthly and sublime in a way unmatched by Hals and Sargent and their wannabes, or even Rembrandt and Velásquez.

Magnolia leaves #2

9/17: Magnolia leaves #2, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in.

While painting the dry, brown and nibbled-at portion of the leaf, I was reminded of the Old English riddle I revisited the other day. The challenge of translating is similar to that of painting from observation, in that an attempt to "literally" restate what's presented to you isn't usually the best way (I am still learning this). Of course, all subjects get simplified in a painter's own peculiar way, even subconsciously, but invariably there are sections that have to be more dramatically edited in order for them to make sense. That section of the leaf was challenging enough because of the complexity of color and pattern on the surface, but made trickier by the small working area. I took on the challenge instead of changing the leaf entirely to avoid it, and worked and reworked that small part until I felt it was both simplified enough and yet had enough of that quality I found interesting to begin with. I don't know how successful I've made it, or how I would have done it differently. But the nice thing is that no one but I would know for sure what the leaf actually looked like.

As I worked on the riddle of the swan I liked the specificity of some of the Old English words and kept them literal. But a few lines were more demanding. "Flóde ond foldan" is literally "flood and earth," or, flow/tide/sea/stream/river and dry land/soil/ground/country. In my mind the literal approach seemed the simpler one, but the more I thought the more detached it felt from the sense of the poem. The challenge was to find a better way and one that wasn't an attempt to outdo the well-crafted original with something I had just crafted. I'm not the first to suggest "field," though that has its word, feld (but they are probably related). And even though the whole riddle speaks symbolically of the swan as a "ghost" traveling between worlds, the specific ideas of field and stream make more sense to me in creating a picture of the animal than weightier symbolic terms like earth and flood.

More of a challenge was "oþþe þá wíc búge" in the second line (or third half-line). It literally says "or the dwelling(s) inhabit" - it's not clear to me if it's plural. That is, occupy/dwell (in) a dwelling/house/village. Wíc survives in some place names as -wich or -wick and so I took license and thought of it in a broad sense, unspecific like "ground" and "waters," hence my pick of the word "place."

Before starting to write this I found the blog "Brave New Words" which talks about translation. It seems interesting and I'll have to read it when I have more time.

Magnolia leaves

9/16: Magnolia leaves, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in. SOLD

Well, we think they're from a magnolia - I collected a few leaves from around some saplings we saw by the water behind the apartments on a neighboring street. As well as an exercise at foreshortening this was at one point a more deliberate color experiment, with the blue-green of the background (mainly cerulean and ochre) much stronger, but that became very distracting so I softened it.

Pine cones

Pine cones, oil on canvas panel, approx. 8x10 in.

8/3. My accuracy here wasn't so good. I think I may have even added an extra row of scales somewhere on the upright cone.