Sorrow

Sorrow

Oil on panel, March 2015, A. De Monte.

This is the third time I painted this subject.  My father is a writer and he completed both a serious history in addition to an historic fiction on a little-known, but important Revolutionary War hero.  This is a subject from the historic fiction.  I will say no more because my father is very protective about his work until he gets it published, and rightfully so.  But divorced from the context, you still get the emotional impact of my picture. 

Anyway, my first attempt at the subject was a Prismacolor pencil drawing I did in high school that legitimately took people’s breath away.  That one was my father’s favorite (I am afraid I can’t show it to you until we get published).  And since I thought it was the best and most important of all my illustrations, I attempted it again in the more permanent medium of oil paint.  The second attempt had better technique, but it had lost something.  The picture you see here is my third attempt and my favorite.  I utilized some romantic pictorial devices to strengthen the emotional power of the image. 

So you see a woman in her wedding dress about to throw herself off the cliffs and into the sea.  The associations and contexts you can read into this are endless.  The earth has become a hell, and the clouds swirl downwards and foretell of her imminent movement.  There is one patch of clear sky that seems like a faint hope, but even that is a noxious yellow.  The angry sea smashes itself into the cruel, jagged rocks at the bottom. 

The clouds burn downwards like the despairing feelings in the hearts of the afflicted.  “All the days of the afflicted are evil.” And I’ve been there.  As someone prone to occasional depression (aren't most artists?), I think I have succeeded in depicting these things.  I make an effort to not share pain in artworks – I prefer to build up rather than break down – but I don’t feel too sad looking at this one.  There’s a difference between a meditative sorrow and outright despair.  “Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.” I always feel better after seeing an artwork with romantic sorrow or romantic loneliness in it.  I hope this work makes my viewers feel better.

On a lighter note, I’ll also share some information on my technique.  This was painted with Groves’ Roberson’s Medium.  I recommend it for anyone open to using resin mediums – at least give it a try so you see what all the hype about megilp mediums is about.  See all the texture manipulation that I got with ease.  I got visibly different effects in the trees, clouds, rocks, sky, waves, and foam all without a struggle.  Megilp mediums really are wonderful for brushwork.  Even so, the J. P. Ridner medium I have spoken about before is a great substitute for megilp and comes close to equaling it, though it is a bit more unpleasant under the brush for its stiffness.  Both were around in the days of the HRS and I shall tell you at a later date how to tell the difference between the two (they are very similar in effects).  Megilp mediums are vilified today, but with only a few layers like I have here, you should not have to fear ill effects.  The brazen examples of megilp misuse, Joshua Reynolds and J. M. W. Turner, did other things that could better explain the deformity of their works today.  Reynolds employed draperymen who used different mediums from him, which caused problems when they overlapped each other, and Turner switched between copal and megilp within the same painting.  Actually, both of them experimented far worse than this and committed many other technical sins.  By the next generation, our few American treatises on technique were imploring artists to learn from their mistakes and use the same medium throughout the same work. 

I’m really happy with the clouds.  I painted them by first laying down a pure layer of French ultramarine into which I worked cadmium orange.  After that was dry, it got two glazes of quinacridone red.  I gained some insights as to how Church painted Twilight in the Wilderness by doing this.  With techniques like these, the physical artworks have properties that just cannot be seen completely in reproductions.  Though it is small, I had to resort to my camera as my scanner just could not handle the color in this work. 

May you never feel like this painting.  And if you do, may this painting make you feel better.