New Years Resolution

Colwyn Bay
An Original Oil Painting
By Sharon A. Hart


A few years ago I was very active in a local arts organization. One of my dear friends attended a workshop by a nationally recognized watercolourist. When he posed the question “What would you suggest I do to take my work to the next level?”, we both were shocked by the response. The artist suggested we both withdraw from the art organizations we belonged to so that we could concentrate on our work and spend more time in the studio.

As we’ve entered into a new year, I’ve reflected on that advice. I’ve also made the decision to become more seriously invested in my own work, even if that means appearing to be a little selfish by being less active in other forums, including this blog. As someone else has shared, “The internet is just too much of a seductive place to spend the bulk of my day and have nothing to show for the time except a lightly overloaded and confused mind and a lonely studio.”

Periodically I’ll post something as the muse leads me to pontificate or if I have a particularly interesting painting to share. In the interim, I wish you all a great and creative 2010!

Dr. Johnson could never persevere in keeping a journal

Land's End
by
Sharon A. Hart
mixed media - Watercolor & paper







Writing 457 He [Johnson] told me that he had twelve or fourteen times attempted to keep a journal of his life but never could persevere. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.


When I elected to initiate this blog it was fueled by the desire to share a glimpse of the artistic process and allied interests with others. To this end, I feel the blog has been successful. It did, however, create a form of blockage to the painting process, a form of procrastination that created interference by the act of deciding whether to pick up a brush or put my fingers to the keyboard. Consequently, since January I have avoided writing in this public forum so that my real love, painting, would not be sacrificed.

Whereas there are numerous artists who have brought something "new" to art, I have always sensed that the role of the artist is to make others see seasoned landscapes anew. Whether it be a "landscape of emotion" or a pastoral scene, the artist is challenged to expand one's perception and enter into a dialogue with the artist, the medium, and one's self.

During an interview, Nancy Ireson, curator at the National Gallery of Art in London, said: "There is a Renoir that we know, the chocolate box Renoir, and there is a secret Renoir.

"Renoir wasn't so keen on showing them, some were unfinished, and they wouldn't have commanded the same prices, but landscapes were absolutely integral to his life.

In a way he used landscapes to test himself."

I suspect that Renoir was not alone in painting landscapes as a vehicle for expanding his skills and vision; one can readily reflect on Monet's Haystacks series which effectively examined expression of transient appearances – unvarying the motif -- viewed always from the same angle, only the light would change, depending on the season, the weather and the time of day. Monet's experimentation left the world richer and continues to inspire other artists, expanding their perception of the universe unfolding. Kandinsky, after seeing several of Monet's haystack paintings, wrote in his memoirs: “What suddenly became clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, which I had not understood before and which surpassed my wildest dreams”.

Since January, I have been doing some experimental work and exploring the concept of "pure landscape" painting, a genre devoid of the human form or other aspects that would initiate the viewer's immediate placement of the scene in the annuals of chronology, mythology, or national geography. I have no idea where this adventure will end or how often I may abandon the brush for the keyboard, but rest assured Creativity will find her way through the labyrinth one way or another.

Brief History of Landscape Painting

Simple Thoughts on the New Year

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning."--T.S. Eliot

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account."--Oscar Wilde

How Would You Tell the Tale?

Adoration of the Magi
by John Duncan

Journey of the Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

– T. S. Eliot