18" X 30"
by Louis B. Shalako
c2010
All Rights Reserved
(NFS)
This painting is acrylic on a panel that had a bad painting already on it. The daffodils don't look too good, and the thing could use a fair amount of work. Other than that, I'm pretty pleased after not painting at all for seventeen years. In that sense, it is worth pursuing for its own sake.
Badly painted as the daffodils are, it is that fine sensibility that put them there--not too many painters could make this work, after all. So there is hope. (Where there is tea, there is hope. -ed.)
The thing uses classic colour theory but neatly bypasses the need for scientific perspective by presenting a flat plane for the entire background. It uses the original composition, which I didn't like much at first. The original painting was so soft and indistinct, all pastels with no hard edges. Yet my version hardly qualifies as 'magic realism.'
It is anything but modern; in fact it is a kind of folk art more than anything else.
The danger of taking a few art courses is that we think we know something. That's not always a good thing. But if I had to put a finger on any particular influence, I would first say 'impressionist,' and perhaps even 'Fauvist.'
As still lifes go, it seems to have a lot of life and motion. I was just telling someone that Vincent van Goght's work appears as if every brushstroke was 'a mad impulse of sheer emotion,' or something. But this painting is perhaps more finely calculated than that.
I suppose I should take the thing back out in the garage and do some more work on it, rather than just sitting around talking about it.
When I get around to it, I've been thinking of painting a man in silhouette--rimmed in moonlight, and with some kind of Rousseau-like magical garden for a setting. I need some kind of art for my blogs, etc.
-louis