Showing posts with label Michelangelo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michelangelo. Show all posts

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Night of the Snow Blind Moon Take Two

Night of the Snow Blind Moon
24 x 30 Mixed Media on Artists Canvas
$1650
I have often wondered if Michelangelo ever walked back into the Sistine Chapel and wanted to change anything about the Last Judgement? Or did in pointedly avoid the Chapel after his work was finished? Creative people are often doubters in their own skills and also in their work. Insecure.

So Night of the Snow Blind Moon was declared done by signing it and writing a progress blog. And yet it sat on my easel. Actually two easels because I traded up to another in that expanse of time. So it was deliberately moved from one to the next when the logical thing would be to install the hanging hardware and find a place on my studio walls for it. But it remained on the easel for me to stare at daily. And visitors to my studio, rather more than normal, would walk by it and ask if it was done.

"Yes," I would replay sensing a doubt in my own declaration.

The doubt was the foreground. I wanted simplicity there because I did not want to over-power the elk. And my other paintings in the On the Edge series don't have foregrounds really. I can still defend my previous assumption it was done as shown below.

Night of the Snow Blind Moon before

It is not as if I have not changed other works of art. The digital age makes it really easy to do another take on a photograph of merit. And during college I used to travel home with art supplies to "fix" paintings I have given my folks. They loved them as is but I was embarrassed at perceived flaws.

And since the painting was still on the easel I must have my doubts. And so I got out the oil sticks. It had to be oil sticks. I had already coated the finish so watercolor would not work easily. I have begun to use oil sticks more and more in the foreground of my paintings. And the thought of a total work in oil lingers but it would require big bucks for new brushes. Besides you cannot pour oil paints.

So I think I am now done with this work. If not I will just begin a new on another canvas.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Magpie Tales 90 - Cemetery Strolls

Magpie Tales by Tess Kincaid

Cemetery Strolls

Just Mother and Me
Seeing the sights
In ancient Rome
Old World Cemeteries.

All those miles in a stroller
All those centuries of history
Names carved in marble
Shelley, Keats, Bellini, 
Sir Thomas Moore and Michelangelo.

Cathedrals and cemeteries
Frescos and fountains
Fables and myth
Etched into a young mind
Recorded on Kodak film.

Albums of photographs
Recording me at two
Before Bellini's crypt
On the square at St. Peter's
Memorial to martyrdom.

At times most alone
I go to cemeteries
Walk among the monuments
To lives I never knew
And feel at home.

J. Binford-Bell
November 2011

Visit Magpie Tales for links to other poetic flights spurred by Tess Kincaid's photographic prompt.