While I waited, I sketched the mud puddle beside me. The rain streamed off the corrugated roof and splashed the water, making big bubbles. The puddle was a sea of overlapping ripples.
I used watercolor and water-soluble colored pencils, scratching through the white vertical lines when I got home.
23 comments:
This is seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary; a reminder to welcome small-scale wonders into our lives. Thanks.
Masterful! A subject like this could easily have been unrecognizable, without a verbal explanation, but you really pulled it off. Somehow, I think that the corner piece of masonry helps to identify the subject, though I'm not exactly sure why.
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i love your blog!
Very cool :) I went out to paint today but gave up and went home when it started raining because I couldn't find a good shelter with a nice view. Maybe I shouldn't have been so picky though...
Absolutely beautiful.
James, I will never go to Jiffy Lube again without at least a pencil and paper. I always wondered how the heck you can be so darn prolific. I guess now I know.
Awesome! I love it!
very inspirational, both to art and to life in general.
Steve said it: you saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. Reminds me the watercolor I’ve done when I was waiting for a repair at “garage Jose”. His stuff was considered as “visual pollution” by the locals, but I liked the “plein air ballet” of cars on lifting platforms:
http://www.watercolor.fr/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/garage_jose.jpg
I love this. I live in California where it is normal to go to a carwash every two weeks and have a gang of people swarming over the car for 20 minutes, doin all sorts of jobs. I have a large book containing six years of carwash guy sketches. best life drawing gesture poses ever! nice to see I am not alone in the waiting room art school.
Lovely!
"Search for the small things, giving joy in life."
Confucius
Hey, I have this on my calendar, depicting a dew drop apple tree blossom this week.
The headline made me think of that old blog post of yours about "the mud debate". I guess this one is a strong argument for the position that mud in a painting doesn't have to be a bad thing ...!
"Mud debate"
reminds me of Delacroix, the painter and master of color, who once exclaimed: "give me a piece of excrement on the street - I'll take it up and paint the flesh of Venus out of it!"
fantastic Jim!
I had just read the bit in your book about how mud is the sauce of a painting, so that was the first thing that came to mind, seeing this. You've turned a scene most folks would hurry past into a work of art worthy of hanging. Lovely
I'd love to actually see you paint something like this. Ever thought of having someone film you while working?
James,
Found these little tidbits (starting @ $2M) this AM. Thought of you. http://fineart.ha.com/common/view_item.php?Sale_No=6061&LotIdNo=1001&type=around-comicnews-tem051911
You've changed forever the way I look at mud puddles.
Love the bubbles. And I especially love that murky yellow color in the upper right-hand corner -- which seems to capture perfectly what mud puddles really look like.
I'm sure the folks over in the MUDDY COLORS blog will appreciate this.
You are an amazing artist. You can do anything.
Wow. Thanks so much for all your encouraging words. I wish I were as enlightened and connected as you give me credit for.
Actually, I had just erased a couple of lame attempts to draw the forklift (visible at extreme right), and turned to the puddle because I thought it would be easier. The more I got into the puddle (so to speak) the more I thought about how I admire the work of the unsung heroes of effects animation——in films like Fantasia's Nutcracker Suite.
It's funny how I end up having the best time sketching while stuck somewhere: laundromats and airports and such. With no pressure to match my picture to a preconceived image, I'm much freer to really look at the stuff I usually overlook, or as Cindy says, the scenes we hurry past.
Mr Cachet, that's an amazing fossil for sale. I hope it goes to a museum.
Great little sketch!
Beautiful! I love watercolor. Never used the pencils though. Just the cakes and the tube paints.
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