Thursday 4.25.24

Final Week in Seattle (with sketches), Part 1 of 2

As the date approaches when I begin my drive from Seattle to Flagstaff (May 1, Wednesday one week from today), it is a time of tying up loose ends, finishing work, packing, preparing.

I am looking forward to the drive, to seeing old friends, to the experience of painting out-of-doors in a new but somewhat (I expect) familiar landscape: the high desert.  I have been to the high desert before, from February to August of 2021, learning oil painting from Tony and Celeste Ryder in The Ryder Studio, their atelier-style intensive fine arts training studio in Santa Fe, NM.  The time spent there was life changing.  I returned to Seattle from that time a different person.  My artwork was permanently set on a different path, one I’d not have discovered without the new ways of seeing I learned there.  It’s hard to put into words, but I went from seeing the world largely conceptually to largely optically, as I became a better receiver of visual information.  Seeing more, I could now paint or otherwise represent more, and have a better handle on what the world actually looks like.

As I was just saying to someone the other night, I sometimes wish that I could go back, that I could “unsee” the color that now so permanently saturates my consciousness when I take in light with my vision.  At times I miss the simplicity of only having access to painting or drawing subjects conceptually, and most of all, I miss the sense of mystery when I beheld complicated visual phenomena.  Now, seeing things visually much, much more accurately, and being able to match what I see in drawing and painting, somehow the world can at times seem limited, as if I already can see what is, rather than what might be, or what lies beyond my perception.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with Final Week in Seattle (with sketches), Part 2 of 2

Cheers,

David