Indian cries in the distance

It's no secret I am super fond of Charles Burchfield. He's a watercolorist from Ohio and I have gone to see his work in Buffalo. In his work, he attempted to paint sounds. Crickets, animals of the field, birds...he uses paint and paintstrokes to depict the sounds. I love that idea. So I tried it....but it came about accidently. In a DADA and coincidental way, as is typical with my work.

 

A glimpse of the stencils at Nellis Tavern. The stencil in the center was the one I was interested in.

I started out thinking about doing a piece that would be about the inside of the house, prior to the action. I wanted to use something locally inspiring. There were some really fine stencils that I saw at the Nelliston Tavern. I wanted to use these in my artwork, maybe as a pattern on the wall.
After I painted the first strokes, I had to let it dry before I could continue. I was not liking what was on the paper so far. It didn't look spaced properly to be a stencil. I was really blasé when I was painting, and it pissed me off that this was not going to work as I had planned. Damn, if it wasn't happening on one of my better sheets of paper, too. I usually try to rise up to the occasion when unplanned things happen in my work and I tend to be too thrifty about supplies. I turned the sheet upside down. Suddenly, the stencil looked like wispy feathers. Feathers! That connected with the idea of Indians in my video....and then I went all Burchfield in my mind. I began to look at these paint strokes as sounds instead. I took out the pen and ink, and tried to fill in a little bit, to suggest feathers...Echoing feathers.

 

Indian whoops

At this point, I was still so-so about the piece. The drips were another attempt to shower these sounds down on the land. Not so sure that idea worked.... I added the 2 barns on blaine, trying to take advantage of whatever textures I could, this time some florist foil. The end result turned out usable. I am not super fond of this piece, but I think I can use it in the video. And I have isolated the feathers already and maybe they can be recycled a la video, too. The process continues.