Quotations like this one can be understood on different levels so while I'm sitting here this morning waiting for my meds to kick in and make me fit as a fiddle again, let me tell you about this painting. It was the winter of 2006-07 and I was long past retirement but at that time I was seriously thinking about it. I had taught for nearly 40 years and wasn't sure I could fill the empty spaces in my life that would follow the loss of working with young people. They loved art, I loved teaching art, and there was a ton of love between those students and me. I wasn't sure I could live without it.
So in the very late fall I was looking at my daylily pictures; so many colors, so much to choose from, but if I were going to paint during my retirement I wanted to paint something different. It just had to be different, not the usual, not something you'd glance at then move on and forget. There was a picture of the wide view of one of my daylily gardens, just layers and layers of daylilies all in bloom, but right in the middle of it there was a dark red that caught my eye. The eye of it was very nearly mint green fading into yellow. It had been a gift from my uncle and was one of his seedlings so it had no prim and proper name. But it was so beautiful, that unknown, unnamed daylily. I made a little sketch of the shape of it, just plain, no ruffled edges, but I planned to paint it just to see if I could maximize the shape greatly without losing the warmth and the faint ripples in the petals. Before winter, the canvas was stretched and primed and the painting had a coat of color, the darkest hues bringing the shape to life.
Most true artists don't try to duplicate reality. You can do that with a camera. Most true artists try to capture the feeling he senses when he sees such a great thing of beauty as the daylily. He tries to capture the breathtaking moments, the oooohhhh and the ahhhhhhhhh moments, the mornent our hearts skip a beat when we find ourselves within that beauty. We try to capture the gasp, the glory of it all. But in doing that, we often don't see a line that goes here or a shadow that falls there or a ripple that makes a dent. Most true artists paint from the heart, most photo-realist artists paint from the eye. There is a difference.
Once my red daylily was painted onto its 3'x3' canvas, it became a thing of beauty, its name no longer mattered, what mattered is that it is so big and bold and bright and when first seeing it, some kind of reaction will be written all over your face. Good, bad or indifferent, it doesn't matter . . .. what matters is that I wanted to capture a feeling and share it with you, and that is exactly what I did.
Paintings are rather like music as they invoke feelings within us, whether it's the stroke of the brush, the melody or lyric they strike a chord, As a musician I can well identify with the artist, the dedication to our art takes a lot even with practice.. So in conclusion Sharon has a talent both natural and learned through hard work.
With good reason to...
