The Dark Rhythm

Nothing ominous, despite the title of this post.

I started another blossom picture, even though I swore I wouldn't (at least for a while). But for the past couple days I've had this persistent image in my mind of a field of dark cells with only a couple fairly small areas of substantially lighter cells. Only one way to get it to leave me alone, and that's to start painting it out.

If I made this picture the way it appears in my head, it would be an ordeal. I can't make little cells that are nearly black; well, I can't make them that dark and still retain the type of shading on which the cells depend. I'll see how it goes. For now, the dark cells will be made up of bloodstone, various grays, sepia and Van Dyck brown. Maybe some umber mixed with gray or bloodstone.

The reason I titled this post Dark Rhythm is that's how I see this picture, if it works the way I hope. Almost all of the blossom pictures (with one major exception) have their own rhythms, but in almost every case the rhythms are somewhat obscured by the patterns in the picture. With a couple of them my greatest pleasure came from setting the picture on the floor and then walking slowly around it to see the change in the rhythms. And so, with this one, there will be no real patterns; it will be dependent for its success on the rhythms, and I have to accept the risk that I'll spend many hours on it only to find it's a failure.

I've set myself a goal of putting in at least 50 cells per day. This is being painted on a sheet of Bristol that's 16 X 20 inches, so there will probably be 2,500 or more cells. Fifty days of work spread over an indeterminate number of months.... I don't expect to be able to sustain my mental commitment to this without breaks.

Maybe in a couple weeks I can post an in-progress photo. It will probably take that long before I know whether this picture is going to work.

[Update: I've put in 80 cells so far, covering an area about 3 X 3 inches. I'm optimistic. The picture is picking up a nice texture. I wish I could make the cells smaller, but that would drive me nuts. It's bad enough that there are already about 9 per square inch. Any smaller and I'd have to peg 2016 as the year I'd finish it, but going smaller would be the only way to get the cells as dark as I would like. I'll have to settle for how it's going.]

Subsequent thought on this picture: I have to wonder if this thing is some sort of delayed after-effect of another picture I did several years ago. Actually, it's only a portion of that picture. It's a corner of the picture, where the cells are all dark. I realize that my way of making these pictures has changed in the past couple years, and I wonder if I can ever will myself to go back to making them that way, because I've never re-captured the feel of that picture. Here is a crop from the older picture:

It's actually a bit darker than this in the original picture, but the blog site is once again not displaying the photo the same as my monitor does. I never noticed until this moment how irregular the cells were in that picture. Wow, I really have become kind of rigid in how I now make these pictures. I have to give that some thought....not sure I'm too happy about it.

Dec. 3 update: Here's a progress photo. I had to take it under artificial light. I'll try again during the daytime. Close to 400 cells done so far, so I'm ahead of schedule on this.
It's actually a bit darker in appearance than it appears in the photo. This is an area maybe 6 X 7 inches. Some of the rhythms are starting to show up, along with sub-rhythms (sorry, I can't think of a better term). I won't know for a while how far away to stand to see this best. I'm guessing 8 to 10 feet right now, but that will be more clear to me when I have about twice as many cells in.... which will mean I'm about 1/3 of the way to finishing it. Do you see why this stuff can wear me out?

 

December 3

December 6

It should be apparent from the above photos how hard it is to get a photo that shows the picture accurately. If you saw this picture in person you'd think it was almost entirely dark gray. In the December 6 photo the picture is about 15% to 20% complete. There are about 400 cells at that stage. 

As blossoms go, this one, in its initial stages, has been relatively easy. It's about to get more difficult, because now is when I have to start making decisions, and decisions always seem to initially paralyze me. I become tentative, but my apprehension is more a product of worrying about screwing up the picture than an uncertainty regarding how the picture plays out in my mind. In this picture, I have to resolve how to introduce lighter areas against a prevailingly dark background; in most blossoms, I usually have to transition from light to dark. 

At any rate, it will be a week or so before I get to that point, partly because I'm leaving on vacation and won't be able to work on this until I get back.

Update 12/24/14: I was wrong about this picture when I originally made this post. It has ended up having patterns that do exactly what I had hoped they wouldn't do. The picture has the rhythms I wanted, but just like with all the other pictures the rhythms are somewhat obscured by the play of light against dark. I'm satisfied with the picture itself, as it currently stands, but I'm not happy that what I originally hoped for has failed to come about. What I am happy about is that once this picture is finished I'm going to swear off blossom pictures for a while and focus more on dimensional stuff that doesn't beat me up.