Almost Independence Day
© 2014
Media: oil & mastic on canvas
Location: in a collection
40" x 66" (102 cm x 168 cm)
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For those of you with low vision:
In overlapping views reminiscent of a double exposed photograph, this painting depicts multiple images in varying perspectives. Painted in vibrant blues and greens, with swooping architectural lines, the bottom portion of the painting becomes the focal, depicting a panoramic view of a woman sitting on the edge of a huge covered porch. The woman looks out across a landscape with scattered tennis courts and small buildings in the background. The view continues across the clear late-afternoon sky above the ocean, with a finger of land in the middle distance. Overlapping, on the top portion or the painting, is the view from behind a row of windows stretching across a porch with a hammock, beyond a beach house and onto the ocean. In the middle ground, are the faint traces of a chair and stool, while layered above in the right corner rests an open notebook with a pen sitting in the folds of the pages.
The nautical chart that is painted in a faint glaze over the middle ground was chosen because it is another way of drawing this panorama of this place: if you were to look in the direction she is looking, you would just barely see on the horizon the Little Gull lighthouse that’s at the center of the chart. Nautical charts tell us what we can't see, including warnings about trying to anchor on a bottom that we can’t see, such as rocky: RKY, or hard: HRD. That is a narrative way of describing the surroundings, much as this style of painting is.
