A Place for Devotions
(I have revised this post since the first two commentors posted.)
This post is about a painting that has the above title. To see it, click that title. Conveniently it is also a link to my gallery weblog, "Scenes and Statements."
I tried to post the picture here, but the image is so large that it stretches across the whole width of the page, and in so doing, the template opens up a huge amount of unnecessary blank space on the right side in all the rest of the weblog, which just doesn't work. The gallery weblog is a temporary solution till I figure out how to reduce the image, so that I can keep it here. But posting it in that larger size isn't all bad, the better to see the detail.
I painted "A Place for Devotions" four years ago, using as references photos that I had taken during two trips in the summer to Japan, once by myself on a college fellowship in 1959, and again in 1966 with my wife.
The building is from the 1966 photos. It is the Higashi-Honganji temple in Kyoto, the cultural center of Japan. Kyoto was one of the first candidates to be considered for atom bomb obliteration in the closing days of World War II, before cooler heads prevailed. And in fact, mercifully, it was never bombed at all, so that, unlike other major Japanese cities, it still had a large number of ancient wooden buildings like this. I especially liked the smooth, bluish sheen of the wood, so lovingly polished by the careful tread of the devout through the years.
I lifted the people from another place and another year, in photos taken in 1959 in the Itsukushima shrine on the island of Miyajima, 20 miles due south of Hiroshima, which as you know was bombed, and very drastically, too, though when I first visited it 14 years later, you would never have known, had they not deliberately left reminders, notably the Peace Park.
This painting was quite difficult to do, because of the enormous amount of detail in the temple, and even more because of the figures. It's not easy to lift people out of several other pictures and place them to the proper scale in a setting where they didn't originally occur, especially with as many as five. First you have to size them properly from the near to the distant planes of the painting, and that's a bear all by itself. But then you also have to do some heavy mulling over their placement in relation to each other and to the setting.
One of the main reasons I paint is just to see if I can do it, and "A Place for Devotions" is a special example of that.
I still have most of my paintings in my possession, though I do sell a few from time to time. As you may suspect just from looking at this one, I spend so much time and effort on them that eventually they become like offspring, making me reluctant to part with them.
This painting is acrylic on masonite. It measures about 1-1/2 by 2 feet. Usually I paint larger.
This post is about a painting that has the above title. To see it, click that title. Conveniently it is also a link to my gallery weblog, "Scenes and Statements."
I tried to post the picture here, but the image is so large that it stretches across the whole width of the page, and in so doing, the template opens up a huge amount of unnecessary blank space on the right side in all the rest of the weblog, which just doesn't work. The gallery weblog is a temporary solution till I figure out how to reduce the image, so that I can keep it here. But posting it in that larger size isn't all bad, the better to see the detail.
I painted "A Place for Devotions" four years ago, using as references photos that I had taken during two trips in the summer to Japan, once by myself on a college fellowship in 1959, and again in 1966 with my wife.
The building is from the 1966 photos. It is the Higashi-Honganji temple in Kyoto, the cultural center of Japan. Kyoto was one of the first candidates to be considered for atom bomb obliteration in the closing days of World War II, before cooler heads prevailed. And in fact, mercifully, it was never bombed at all, so that, unlike other major Japanese cities, it still had a large number of ancient wooden buildings like this. I especially liked the smooth, bluish sheen of the wood, so lovingly polished by the careful tread of the devout through the years.
I lifted the people from another place and another year, in photos taken in 1959 in the Itsukushima shrine on the island of Miyajima, 20 miles due south of Hiroshima, which as you know was bombed, and very drastically, too, though when I first visited it 14 years later, you would never have known, had they not deliberately left reminders, notably the Peace Park.
This painting was quite difficult to do, because of the enormous amount of detail in the temple, and even more because of the figures. It's not easy to lift people out of several other pictures and place them to the proper scale in a setting where they didn't originally occur, especially with as many as five. First you have to size them properly from the near to the distant planes of the painting, and that's a bear all by itself. But then you also have to do some heavy mulling over their placement in relation to each other and to the setting.
One of the main reasons I paint is just to see if I can do it, and "A Place for Devotions" is a special example of that.
I still have most of my paintings in my possession, though I do sell a few from time to time. As you may suspect just from looking at this one, I spend so much time and effort on them that eventually they become like offspring, making me reluctant to part with them.
This painting is acrylic on masonite. It measures about 1-1/2 by 2 feet. Usually I paint larger.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 12:46 AM
3 Comments:
You might want to think about reducing the size of your picture. Then it won't force the posts down to the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it's a beautiful picture.
I don't blame you for not wanting to part with this one.
Wow!
Thanks much, Andante and Guy. And I agree with you totally, Guy Andrew (cool name by the way) about the size of this picture. But at first I was of two minds, because on the other hand this large size helps the viewer to see the picture better.
But now I'm trying to get myself together to figure out how to reduce it, because, having just now put today's post on, I see that from now on my whole weblog is going to have a LOT of empty space to the right, and that just won't cut it.
It was a great triumph for me merely to wrestle this image onto this weblog in the first place, as Blogger requires you to use pics that you already have stored elsewhere online, and the only such place available to me is an old website on AOL. I can get to that site but changing the size of a picture that's already on it may be another matter. But I will have to do something, and soon!
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