Art is Long
The Beauty of Perspective
I am presenting a new exhibition of my work this month which includes older paintings from my personal collection not offered to the public before. The show did not start out to be a retrospective, but is, instead, a creative response to my recent injury, which halted all progress on the new paintings I had in the works in my studio. This left a gap which needed to be filled, so I selected the best of older pieces I had, to add to the exhibition. Now that I see it beautifully presented on the gallery walls, I think that this exhibition is really more interesting than what I had originally planned.
As an example, the painting above, Swan Dance, was created from a moment I saw in the Papal Gardens in Avignon, France. I was there, along with Ann, teaching a watercolor workshop at various locations in the south of France. I had the class set up at an overlook onto the Rhone River which had a spectacular view of the Château-Neuf du Pape vineyards in the distance and the ruins of the famous Pont d’Avignon bridge below. Funny thing is, when I got home, this is the picture I thought was most interesting to me, and remains so, even after repeated visits to Avignon in the years since. The moment matters in art.
Another moment that mattered, was this one—a lovely, foggy morning on a pond nearby, where I have painted often. As I worked, the fog became a moving curtain of light, alternately obscuring and revealing, blurring the line between water and sky. Birds appeared out of the fog and just as quickly disappeared. As I painted, I imagined an artist painting away in a boat floating in that diaphanous space. Perhaps it was me in my studio boat, perhaps it was the Master, Claude Monet, working in his studio boat on the river Epte. The power of mist and light to fire the imagination is the stuff art is made of.
Then there is this watercolor moment—I was standing in the Merced River in Yosemite National Park painting the brilliant September light with a painter friend, Thomas Paquette, when I knocked an expensive brush off my palette into the swift current. Thomas immediately sprang into action and made a dive to save the brush for me! That’s the kind of thing one doesn’t ever forget and we’ve been good friends ever since. Unfortunately for Thomas, he had also soaked his electronic key fob and couldn’t get back in to his van when we finished painting for the day. My brush certainly wasn’t worth the cost of replacing that key fob, and fortunately we got it dried out so it worked again. I am astonished how often plein air work becomes attached to some interesting event happening while we work, and those memories become locked into the paintings. I think it is why I don’t mind keeping those.
This one is my second version of a perfect morning in June in Tuscany, Italy, just after sunrise. Ann and I were teaching another week-long workshop in this picture-postcard perfect landscape. I like to get up before class and paint a warmup picture. These workshops take months of planning and organization to set up, and, despite all of our care, we never know what weather will greet us or other unpredictable local conditions might upset our plans until we actually get there. To our great relief, not only was everything as we planned, but the fields just behind me in this painting were covered in bright red poppies! Of course, that had to be where we would have class later! Another set of wonderful memories locked into a simple painting of a farmer cutting wheat in Italy. This is why I paint outdoors—to grab onto a piece of life!
If you are near, come to the show at the Cider Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas, open on Fridays or with an appointment, until June 22nd. If not, you can still see the exhibition on my site: John Hulsey Fine Art. Look for the Brokeneck Mountain Exhibition tab.