Day’s End in Peach
8x10 oil
I tried a new approach with this one, experimenting, still waiting for some kind of “style” to emerge from my work. There are many artistic approaches that I am drawn to, artists whose work I love to linger over — Tim Horn, Brenda Cablayan, Min Ma, Brian Keeler, Michael Chamberlain, Maynard Dixon, Edgar Payne and many more. All of them have very particular styles. And they all knew and know who they are as artists.
I yearn to find in myself such a painterly calling, to focus, to commit, to go deep, and create something good with this delicious art form. My head is filled with thoughts and ideas … but when I stand before my easel I hem and haw and struggle to stay away from my computer, where I can easily spend hours looking at other people’s art … and neglect my own.
This is not a great way to be a painter.
Every morning I get up at five o’clock and, before breakfast, head out for a half mile walk. Just before lunch, I go out again on a three-mile power walk. Along with a pretty decent stretching routine, this is my daily physical exercise. I love this!
Why? Because when I walk, ideas pop into my head and blossom like raindrops on water.
Yesterday on my longer walk I thought about a few of the things in my life that absorbed me so completely that I lost any sense of time passing.
As a toddler, it was sitting on my heels beside a small stream in my grandmothers backyard in Honolulu, watching strangely beautiful crawdads scurry lightly over the silky mud just below the surface.
As a ten-year-old, it was hanging out with my buddies Terry, Roger, Dickie, Dale, and Freddy — roaming around on our bikes, discovering new places, and staying out of trouble. Most of the time.
As a thirteen-year-old it was the Everly Brothers who knocked my socks off, driving me to pick up a guitar. Music was huge, and powerful, and my love for it carried on into young adulthood, writing songs, making up harmonies, and recording them on a sound-on-sound tape recorder. I sank so deep into the music that it captured me for days, months … a lifetime.
Then in my thirties reading and writing came calling, pulling me again into another creative field of play, this time so fully that it became a career.
Now I paint. Captured yet again. What the heck?
What is/was all this magic in my life?
I don’t know for sure, but I like to think of all of it as some kind of calling.
That sounds presumptuous, I know, but it’s not. It’s just a fact. My calling in life has been to use my creative potential to add to the good in the world, whether I receive something in return or not. Make good things and be a good bloke. Simple … and important.
Add to the good in the world.
That’s my calling.
So I try … creating my way to the end … in peach.
