Once I started exploring the world of art making, I began to notice surprises, unexpected messages in my paintings.
“Tortoise in the Park” (above) was an early attempt at making a large painting (30”x22”) by referring to a small photo. I used acrylic paints and oil pastels together on paper to capture this camouflaged desert tortoise, who had found a cool dark water feature in a friend’s back yard.
Many individual elements combined to form the entire composition.
But during the process, and again with the finished work, I could see various shapes and colors arranged in ways that I had not consciously intended. Random textures that invented themselves in the scenery. Mini scenes that were each like a slice of the painting’s DNA.
At this point I started using my camera to preserve sections of the painting where I noticed elements relating to each other in ways that shifted their ‘role’ from just being part of the ‘big picture’. These cropped details introduced new relationships, forming recognizable mini-pictures that were discreet sub-sets of the whole.
The framed photo above, titled “Billabong” is a small section of the large painting, “Tortoise in the Park.” This particular arrangement of cactus shapes, blossoms, a bit of light on rocks, the suggestion of dark green water…struck me as an archetype of a pond, perhaps a pond with special powers.
A memory came to mind. More than a visual image, it was a multi-sensory gestalt nested within the full composition of the painting. The feeling was connected to a novel I had read with a class of seventh graders thirty years earlier. ‘Walkabout’1 was a coming-of-age, rite-of-passage story set in the Australian outback.
From the book we learned that when lost in the vast, uninhabited ‘bush’, finding a source of water and something safe to eat is essential for survival. Depending on the season, there are lakes and rivers. Some rivers flow out in branches. Some branches thin out, stop flowing, are no longer connected to a larger source. This water sometimes forms a cul-de-sac, a collection of water that dead-ends into a pool.
These are called billabongs. They can be marshy and muddy, or deep, clear, and cool. They support life. They might dry up, they might fill again.
The kids and I all liked the sound of a billabong. We imagined a string of life-saving pools stretched across the Australian wilds. Gifts appearing, disappearing, reappearing.
When I added a group of blossoms to the pancake cactus in the lower left of the large painting, the thick acrylic oranges and yellows folded, curled, and stood in peaks like cake frosting. The photo of a few inches magnified them into flowers floating at the edge of a lagoon. This detail became a new ‘slice’, framed and on the wall titled “Leis Adrift” (above).
I appreciate communication and connections that form and highlight benign relationships, whether talking and writing, or by way of lines, colors, and shapes that present visual puns; illustrations that evoke song lyrics and adages; messages that involve rhythms and rhymes; partner dancing (not to mention yodeling and echoes.)
In the classroom I tell my students a story on myself about once being the unsuspecting rube, the butt of a joke, at a time when everyone in my age group was hyper-sensitive about social acceptance by the ‘cool kids’. 2 An example of the old adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
The photo ‘slice’ that became “Green Lagoon” (above) magnifies the color changes under and around the tortoise’s head in the large painting. The earthy hues hint of beach or coral reef to me. The contrasts and blending make me want to be there.
“Tortoise in the Park” and the half dozen ‘slices’ or ‘details’ or ‘offspring’ that were generated from it, served as a rich learning project for me. These three artworks are shown together here in a mock up, thanks to #artmywall, an app that gives me walls and furniture to play with.
originally titled ‘Children’ by James Vance Marshall
https://sherrykillam.substack.com/p/sticks-and-stones