project 52:45

ink, acrylic, paper collage on paper

prints available here

More studies, more experiments, more practice, more discoveries - all for a future painting that I haven't even begun to sketch yet.  This time, I'm testing ideas for a background, with Wallace Stevens on the brain. Specifically, Sunday Morning, a poem with special resonance for both me and the subject of my painting. In the fourth section of the poem, Stevens writes:

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endures; or will endure

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

It's that last bit, the idea of "June and evening, tipped/ By the consummation of the swallow's wings," that I have on the brain. The water's a reference to another repeating phrase in the poem. I think I've discovered (or re-discovered, or remembered) during the course of Project 52 how very much I like illustrating, creating images to pair with words - by which I mean words that have already been written, not the words on the back of the cards, of course. It's a good thing to know about myself. And besides that bit of self-knowledge, these studies are particularly useful. I definitely figured a few bits of the final painting out in the course of making this card!