If anyone recognizes what this is: congratulations! You might have a fine career ahead of you in psychology!
I made this drawing to obsessively reinterate an idea I’ve been working on — relative to a large mural sized painting whose subject I’m frankly at a loss to explain. However, I’ve been around the art block enough times now to trust my instincts and to believe that a picture, whose meaning is baffling even to me, its author, may well hold ideas that can matter to the larger audience of my fellow human beings, 3 billion or so of my closest friends. (You gotta think big.)
It’s a tree. I don’t know why I feel compelled to portray it this way, rather than to make it more conventionally tree-like. But there it is. And let me tell you, your subconscious mind is a fabulous, truly wonderful and remarkable thing! I have stalled on this idea for well over a year, working on other things, and forgeting about this picture.
However, last night as I was driving, I turned a corner and saw a large tractor trailer stopped at a light perpendicular to me at a street onto which I was making a right turn. In the general darkness, as I turned, I noted the enormous shadow of a tree cast onto the side of the trailer. Imagine that huge flat surface being like a canvas, here was the image I’ve wanted to portray in ridiculously large scale, here it was on the side of this truck as on a great, crazy moving canvas! Sometimes you feel as though the great loving God and nature and your own mind are all meeting at the same intersection. It’s a great shot in the arm, let me tell you!
Comments, explanations, psycho-analysis are all welcome.
[Top of the post: the author’s small compositional drawing for a very large enigmatic painting. By Aletha Kuschan]
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