Hazel

Hazel in the Half Melted Snow. The half melted snow is true, and the street is called Hazel. This does not look anything like the photograph that I used to refer to. I’d like you to see the photo, because there’s nothing in common except the fact that there is patchy snow, and there’s a fence, and there’s not much else.

It just, the paintings take on a life of their own, an adventure. There is that tree. It’s a fruit tree. It doesn’t look anything like that. This except that it has a thick stem that grows out of the ground with branches. That’s about all you might notice. Pretty subtle. But the raven appears twice in the lower left.

Pretty hard to see. I can’t exactly explain why I used it, except for the fact that I like it and I painted two figures in the distance. That’s me and my painting Buddy Tanner. And I like some real discrete narrative elements. These are subtle. Here they are. And this was broad daylight. It was, the light was nothing like this.

A year or two after the piece was done, I went over it with a thin red glaze. It’s a painting technique that you can just kind of shift. The temperature of the piece, and I put this transparent red on. In a way, it’s like house paint stains, essentially the same principle that I used on this, to tilt the temperature toward a red.

And when I did it, I thought, oh no, it’s too red. And then it dried, so it was too late whether it was too red or not. And as time went on, I ended up liking this piece quite a bit, even though I had a lot of doubts about it in progress.