Yesterday in studio I worked up a palette of hues in oil, building from a photo I’d saved of an arctic scene in National Geo. You can see that here if you look closely at my messy table. I mixed up a set of replicated hues, pleasing together, and then added notes of my own with them, before I had any idea what I would do myself with this color grouping.

Then I took several prepared papers, and one rubber brush and started making marks. My angled rubber tool is pretty cool for I can switch easily from hue to hue by just quickly wiping it down. This gives me a brief freedom. I can vary the stroke widths by the angle, and modulate the intensity of the laid down paint so easily that exercises with this tool become play. For me, quick work like this gets better at what is deeply inside me than labored more planned out attempts at perfection.

The artic quiet of the original image had me captivated, the skies in that photo looked foreboding. And that’s maybe why I selected it. The skies outside my window were carrying ominous hints too as hurricane bands are moving our way. But things move slow. And it’s in the slowness where I live. Things that matter take so much time! I ponder this and my soul is impatient to the point of unease. That’s maybe also why quick work is so cathartic to me. And so I purposed to just make marks, to let my arms work it out, to try to outline it, as if prompting a resolve. This work is like prayer, it suddenly occurs to me. It happens only because things are not right. It’s productive, learned and practiced because there is felt need. I’m looking out, but “we’re not there yet.”

The Irish writer Josephine Hart said “there is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” And Jesus praised those who hunger and thirst for the things that matter most. I think this is why I keep articulating the contours of horizon.