I'm feeling under the weather today but I've made some good progress.
Last night I had drawn out and fully envisioned a new painting for the Tabernacle competition, a phoenix rising from winter into summer. I added more spectacular embellishments, and more still and the whole picture grew from something that I feared would need a smaller panel into something that absolutely demanded a giant canvas! Then I began to consider what this amazing picture had to do with the poem that forms the subject of the competition, and I found myself trying to fit ideas to the picture and vice versa. I had accidentally ran into a self-pleasuring amazement trap. I hate it when that happens.
My picture was beautiful and spectacular, and I'm sure will be be popular, but it's not really connected to that poem any more and instead was a representation of my current joyous emotional and personal state. Realising that, I set the idea aside for later and began work on the competition from scratch, to consider the poem, and for the fourth time locate an idea that sums it up.
The poem is essentially about an old man remembering a happy summer. The last part is a resolution, stating that summer and winter cycles forever, concluding that one shouldn't then feel sad about a summer past. My previous ideas were about the cycle of the seasons, but this time I decided to work on the reminiscence, and once I'd written that one short sentence that summed up what the poem was about, the picture was easy to envision. It is essentially an old man sitting in a chair thinking of a summer sky.
I decided to add some statues, and bought a Virtual Pose set of reference photos which I'm sure will come in useful. It's a pity that Quicktime doesn't pan and zoom in Windows (it'll zoom, but only on the middle; huh!) because it totally destroys the utility of the mov format for reference photos.
That is all that will be said for now. In other news I read an extensive description of The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke today. I want to paint a version of this painting at some point, but at my current rate and ambition it will take longer than the original to paint; nine years, and unfinished.
