Notes from the Journey

                                               Ponderings 2019

                                         The Mountains of Waterton 30X40 Oil  2019.

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This artistic journey I have been on has had many ups and downs.
It began with drawing - endlessly drawing as a child. I drew everything and anything that sparked my imagination. I remember well as I struggled to capture an  image of a small bird I had found in "The World Book of Knowledge" how I wished I could find some magic way to make the process easier. I longed to know some technique less hindered with errant lines and eraser smudges.

 I was to learn there was no quick or magic way. My sketching proficiency advanced but only glacially over years and years of practice.  Even to this day my ability to draw accurately requires concentration and mistakes still haunt the process.
 Drawing however is but one important actor among many in the whole image making process. A bewildering set of other actors that need co ordination, manipulation and control to create the imagery you desire, complicate things exponentially.

  I once had a phone call from someone who had picked up painting after years of being away. He was a talented guy but he had been struggling mightily to create anything he really liked. In frustration he said "This painting is far harder than anything I have ever done as an engineer."

He had bumped into, face on, the mind boggling reality of painting. The cold fact that there are no rules but yes there truly are rules, and yes there is no road map of how to's, but there must be one or you will crash and burn every time. Add in the issue of what media to use and how, what surfaces to paint on and with what brushes, and you are just beginning to ascend the lower slopes of the Mount Everest of art. We have not even bothered with the zones higher up of color composition and lighting, let alone the even loftier issues of what to paint, and how to paint it, and why you paint at all!

If one laid out in a detailed way all the possible problems in the process of painting, very few would ever want to even bother with such a low probability of success endeavor.

It is safe to say I have endured over the years literally thousands of failures in my attempts to paint. I stopped painting entirely for three years straight once after encountering a serious run of failures.I put my brushes down and went off to the north and  taught school in an arctic community and cleared my head before I began again.
 Have the failures ended ? Have I found the magic way?  No, I still crash and burn from time to time, but it is less and less these days. Being able to get to this point has been only possible because I came hardwired with an enduring passion to create.

This drive has been pushing me to create from those wide eyed days as a child scrawling out smudge riddled drawings on the kitchen floor to present.There is only one I can and will forever credit with this very real "magic ", this true  blessing in my life.
                      The miracle worker. The beauty maker.   
                                                God.

                                    Trip to Waterton 2016

My art involves travel- at times a lot of it. I need it to keep fresh and inspired. I do take photographs on my trips, but I find photographs only get me so far in what I do. My work is more often than not a combination of feeling and reality. The challenge for me is to see how far I can push my take on the images I capture on film or chronicle via my sketch book.
I am presently sitting on a number of shots that I just took from a 5000 km. wander through BC and Alberta via motor bike. The trip included a lot of accessible places but also other places far removed from tourist crowds. It turned out to be one of the more difficult trips I have taken. It was not difficult because the riding was all that hard, but more because of the emotions it stirred - emotions and images I had not even thought off for decades. Southern Alberta and Lethbridge in particular, was where my father moved us to when I was 11. We lived there for 7 years, which took me all the way through from grade six to high school graduation and one year beyond. 

As I rolled through the Porcupine Hills out of Pincher Creek, then motored on to Waterton, a stream of powerfully emotive vignettes from the past came rushing back. It was through this region and west into the Rockies I had spent time working and fishing and hiking just after I left high school. It was to the east out of Lethbridge, alone or with friends beneath the vast Alberta sky, I had so often followed the meandering course of the Old Man River through its endless bordering coulees, exploring for miles. 
As I looked east and saw the table flat land that once were prairies  moving off to infinity, I was taken back to gopher hunting days on the patch of native prairie near our home in Lethbridge. I also recalled frosty, sun just coming up mornings, and sun down golden evenings duck hunting on prairie ponds and sloughs. 

Then without reason, my  mind began dragging up a litany of images and faces from my time in high school; a time I thought I would never remember it was so just plain boring. I began to see a series of film like clips of events and people from the first to those last days in Winston Churchill High watching weird film strips with French conversation added, in the dark. Why they came back I  do not know as some -especially those from that weird French class- were painful to recall.
 
My brother and I finally rolled on into Waterton and after a short time in that wonderful town we had often visited in our youth,
we turned our bikes homeward, scurried down the highway, leaving Southern Alberta to bake in the summer heat. 
 As the faithful BMWs purred away the miles, the  plains, the foothills and then the saw-toothed Rockies all receded in the rear view mirrors. Something else also receded. The convincing sense of  being young again my memories had given, dropped away like a dream on awaking. The return to reality was as disconcerting as it was harsh. 

I had rather liked being a teenager again.
 
Time is a horribly implacable boundary. Our minds seem to tell us that we can re enter days long gone - that we can go back. 
 Like Samson of old, with his hair finally cut and his strength gone, we think as he, that nothing has changed. But alas it has. 
Time has been our Delilah.
 
And so here I am. Home on Vancouver Island sorting through hundreds of images - many from Southern Alberta. 
Whatever else shall affect the paintings I might reference from these shots, I do know the river of  memory and emotion that has  entangled itself with Southern Alberta scenes will impact the images I create.
One emotion packed journey has ended and now, as I turn to paint images from the land just traveled, I know another is beginning. It shall be interesting.

g.  July 30 /2016
 

If you wish to reach me  you can via this address  gshawfineart@gmail.com