Ocala.com Bloggers
- Broken News
- Bill Thompson
- Digital Editor
- Eric Barnes
- Frame 37
- Ocala.com Multimedia
- Marion Politics
- Newsroom
- Observations
- Naseem S. Miller
- OcalaDay
- Joe Byrnes
- Read My E-Mail
- Allen Parson
- Running Wide Open
- Joe Vanhoose
- Speaking of Business...
- Dr. Philip R. Geist
- The Bowling Blog
- Debbie Whitten
- The Green Zone
- Dave Rhea
- The Sports Blog
- Gregory Broome
- What is that?
- Newsroom
 |
Search Blogs
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Blog Archives
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gotta keep those passions under control!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
 |
| Posted by: Emory Schley |
2/28/2007 12:00 PM |
When I was a teen-ager, I was inspired to take up portrait painting, for some strange reason. I guess I just thought it would be a neat thing to learn.
I eventually acquired all the tools of the trade: Linseed oil, turpentine, an impressive assortment of brushes, a palette, an easel, a mahl stick, pencils, erasers, a diminishing glass, canvas, stretcher frames and canvas pliers and lots of tubes of oil paint.
My first attempts were kind of amateurish, looking more like cartoon characters than actual people, but as I persevered, the paintings started improving dramatically. When other teens were out playing football or stickball, I was cooped up in my bedroom pondering the “Magic Triangle," or trying to figure out how much rose madder to add to my titanium white and yellow ochre to get that perfect flesh tone, or how much cerulean blue to use in a lightly shadowed area.
I became obsessed with hair and refused to paint it as a flat patch of color with just a few strands highlighted here and there as I was advised to do. No, I had to paint hair strand by individual strand. As you might imagine, it took quite some time for my portraits to be completed.
But they were, for the most part, almost universally admired. I found it a real challenge to produce a portrait that actually looked like the person it represented. I learned how tones in a portrait could be even more important than hues. I tried chiaruscuro techniques and explored how much dynamic range could be captured in oils. It seemed there was an never-ending universe of knowledge waiting to be discovered. Painting became my First Great Passion in life.
It occurred to me that I was spending so much time behind the easel, it was creating too big of an impact on my life, but I just didn’t care. I was like an addict, oblivious to the consequences of my actions. Many evenings, my mother would call to me that supper was ready. I would yell back, “Be there in a minute.” Then when I finally pulled myself away from the easel, I would be shocked to discover the sun had gone down, and my once-hot supper was now colder than a dead fish. Sometimes my parents had already gone to bed. I marveled at how I could let time get away from me so easily. It always seemed that only minutes had passed, so absorbed was I in my work.
I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t do the extra reading for credit that some teachers offered. I didn’t attend high school football games, it was just paint, paint, paint. Then one day, sensing that I was headed for catastrophe, I just stopped painting, cold turkey! It was difficult, much harder than I ever thought it would be.
Over the years, I would go back to painting from time-to-time, but I would always quit when it seemed to be getting too great a hold on me. It’s been 30 years now, since I’ve dipped a brush into paint. And sometimes, I find myself wondering what might have actually happened had I not quit engaging my passion? Would it have been so catastrophic? Such answers aren’t easy to come up with.
Guess I’ll always wonder about that one! |
|
| Permalink |
Trackback |
|
|
|
|