The Effect Of The Imagination

The weather has been so erratic, with frequent thunder and rain, that I try to get out and paint whenever the sun shines.  This unreal looking, but real, landscape I found yesterday at Field Farm in Williamstown, MA.  From my recent reading of Delacroix's Journal: "Painters of marines do not represent the sea well, in general.  The same approach may be applied to them as to the painters of landscape. They want to show too much science, make portraits of waves, as the landscapists make portraits of trees, of the earth, of mountains, etc.  They do not concern themselves enough with the effect on the imagination; the multiplicity of petty details--even true details--turns the mind away from the principal spectacle, which is the immensity or the depth to be rendered by any given art."  12x12 inches, oil on linen panel.

Abstraction on Flatbush Avenue

What appeals to me about this view of Flatbush Avenue is how the sky in the middle background unites with the tee shirt in the middle foreground to form a u-shape.  One could say the same thing about the two u-shapes on either side as well, though the middle one is more distinct and the distances between the sky and tee shirt much larger.  It's this kind of relationship that a painter can make which is nearly impossible to see outside of a painting.

I've been reading a lot about the painter Delacroix lately.  The exhibition at the Met has spurred me on, though I've always had an interest in Delacroix since reading his journal years ago.  I like Delacroix because he used color and composition in a formal, abstract way even though his paintings are all about stories, whether myths, battles, Shakespeare, etc.  His formal methods are seemingly hidden, and simultaneously right there for all to see.

The painting is 12x12 oil on panel.