Can’t see the woods for the trees….

If you can't see the wood for the trees, you can't see the whole situation clearly because you're looking too closely at small details.

This is actually the main premise behind a class I am currently teaching, and it is funny or appropriate or ironic that I couldn’t see the woods for the trees in my own painting, Waldeinsamkeit, which is a German word that describes the sublime feeling one has while being alone in the woods. My first mistake was incorporating gold in the wrong places, because using big patches of gold in the sky shapes literally and figuratively broke the forest. The feeling of the trees working cooperatively together to form a canopy was lost. What’s more, the blue half light on the rocks were reflecting cool blues in the sky…so why then was the sky a warm gold? It didn’t make actual or pictoral sense. To further hold me back, the gold itself is ‘precious’— it’s costly, and trying to preserve it at the expense of the painting as a whole was a mistake. The relief I felt in painting out the gold in the sky was immediate and telling. It just felt right. Now the forest is a canopy of greengold light. The falling arcing shapes bring your eye down to the tree trunks that reflect the sun in a shower of light. From there your eye falls on the half light of the warm ochre greens on the brook, moving forward along the shapes in the brook to the anchor rock on the bottom right and from there back to the top. I moved the river out o the right too, it just felt good to do that. It was this feeling of a canopy of light, the security and peacefulness of it, the perfect wholeness of it all, that I was trying to express, and to do that I had to sacrifice the big shapes of gold in the sky.