So Here We Go

Over the summer I took a landscape drawing class, four hours a day, five days a week, outside, drawing. It was fantastic. We went to some unusual, out of the way places, one of them being beneath an on ramp to the Cooper River Bridge. The area was as dingy and sketchy as any other dirt and gravel lot beneath a highway, but this one branches of into marshy wetlands and the Cooper River, the bridge's pilings, pillars wrapping off into the distance. Last week I did a painting there (I'll put the photo up when I get back to school). The painting itself is not extraordinary. Afterwards though, after calling it quits on that work, I picked up some random scraps of gesso-ed canvas, and spun out some delightfully spontaneous marsh scenes out of my head. They jumped out of me, fresh, energetic, and cathartic. Each taking a minute or so they lack the evident self doubt that develops through my longer works. It took making the larger, less affective painting to find these, as you cannot intentionally enforce spontaneity.