Welcome to my blog! I recently turned the corner on a new decade, and I’ve stored up a lot of thoughts and observations during my years on this earth. It feels like now’s the time to start sharing them. If not now, when?
Lately I’ve been painting sky scenes. Often, I paint the sky at sunset. I resisted doing this for a long time. I thought sunset paintings were too kitschy, too obvious, too much out of the Thomas Kinkade playbook. But my thinking has changed. The reason for the change has to do with my reflections on some fundamental human tendencies. We seek beauty. We are awed by beauty. When we observe something beautiful that speaks to our soul, we want to capture it. We want to savor it and interact with it and try to hold onto its magic for the future.
As a breathtaking sunset fills the sky, we stop and we turn our faces to the sky and we look. It’s a universal impulse. We also pull out our phones and take photos. Here’s where the desire to interact with and capture something beautiful comes in. I do it, too. Phones are easy and the results are satisfying. But I also try to put the phone away and just absorb the sunset, the second-to-second changes, the colors as they glow and morph and fade.
Taking the next step, and creating a painting about a sunset, feels like swimming in beauty. It’s challenging and frustrating, because what I put on canvas never seems to convey the magnificence or subtle glory of the actual event. But the process of attempting to reach that ideal in my mind’s eye feels like the essence of art-making. And that’s why I paint sunsets.
