2019-08-27 - Motes

Sparrow had sketched in the morning while they were on the road, stretched out on her stomach in the tent with birds chirping noisily nearby. It began in black and white, mapped out in pencil, with written notes about where the color should be, might be, in the finished piece: sunshine yellow here, arterial red there, darkest green in the back. She captured ideas in quadrants: a curl of lips, a row of knuckles, a bent elbow, an emptiness. It grew from there over a course of several days, the finished piece a good bit different from its mid-morning origins.

Size: 30"x40"
Media: Oil on Canvas
Title: Motes

At its simplest, it is a painting of sunlight shining through moss-laden trees. The backdrop is all dark greenery, black trunks rising through verdant growth. Rays of bright yellow light radiate from a central point, casting out to either side. In a different medium, in more ethereal colors, the figures caught in that projection might seem ghostly, insubstantial apparitions, but the entwined shapes trapped within that projected light are instead vibrant and all too present, a natural focus for the onlooker's eye. They are not, however, complete, shown only in glimpses, in fragments, pieces of a whole suspended in sunbeams and held steady.

A pair of half-visible electric blue lips grin against a dark curve, the shell of an ear, suggesting whispering, implying positioning, a taller figure behind a shorter one. One wide eye, orange-irised and darkly lined, looks to its right as if trying to catch sight of the other ghost. Magenta marks the angle of what might be a wide jawline framing another imperfectly preserved pair of lips, these parted in interrupted thought. A slash of teal is underlined in violet, curling around an otherwise unshaped neck. A row of sea green knuckles hold another pink curve around shoulder-height. A crude, too-red heart is shot through with yellow light smeared to green where the bold stroke of petrol blue rising up its center has smudged the sun into new neon hues. The middle seems filled with nothing, all bright glow and green-black backdrop until catching a magenta thumb low along the paired phantoms, flattened against a deep ocean blue, a suggestion of bent knuckles just barely discernible. The rest is indistinct greenery and empty sunlight, muting into malachite shadow.

In the bottom right corner, it's signed in imperfect white: PS Jones

Now to deliver it.