I’m trying to paint.
Sky is hard to paint, for example. As is night, or the time just before sunrise. But even if you can’t paint it right, at least you see it more clearly when you look at it because you’re thinking about how to paint it.
And you notice things like, nothing is ever really black. It’s always some color, actually. Rarely white, too.
Fire is also hard to paint. It’s all like, hold still, goddammit, fire.
Sky is always changing too, but more slowly than fire unless you’re being sucked up a tornado funnel. Another difference is you don’t get as much opportunity to observe fire if you’re lucky.
We had a good chance to observe it at new years at the house of friends when they filled the sterno receptacle under the fondue set wrong and it overflowed and was all, Flame On! and charred our pot and melted our fondue forks.
The kids loved that.
The flames were bluish green and quite transparent with darker cores and danced around.
The sky this morning was grey, but not a single grey, a multitude of greys with a bit of color over by the horizon where the sun was apparently thinking about coming up. And there were feathery bits far off and up high, perhaps rain slashing down. And a variety of clouds, from no clouds to heavy black rain clouds.
And the woods were a nice burnt sienna/ultramarine against that when I drove through the woods. The rain, you might be able to get that with a sort of wash, you know, lots of turpentine in the paint. And the branches against the sky – I’m torn over whether to paint each branch with a small brush, or sort of blur the near-black of the branches into the light grey of the sky there.
And then I round a curve near Vienna and it’s like god is pulling my leg, bright orange sunrise off to the left, massive pink swatches of rain off to the right, all the elements pulled together and for a moment I’m not even trying to imagine how to paint it. And I’m not thinking about how I hurt my wife’s feelings this morning or about how my one daughter is worried how things will go for her in France or how my other daughter has no “off” button.
Sometimes the only thing that saves you are the details. And I wonder how I would paint my family.