Sometimes there is value is starting things over again. This painting is a prime example. The painting was going in a certain direction and it wasn’t working out, for a myriad of reasons, it was just all wrong. It was wrong mainly because I had an idea of how it was going to go in my head, but when I went to actually make that plan come to fruition, it was just not working. In real life, things fail to work out all the time. In this painting, the failure was a lot of things, but mainly the scale, the perspective and to some degree the color. I had it in my head that this seasons series I was working on had to have aspen trees as the primary focus in each painting, but I also really wanted the summer painting to be about flowers and, to a lesser extent, afternoon storms. I really enjoy summertime storms.

So if I had to describe the painting for r/blind I would say that the first painting was not working out because it was the visual equivalent of a meal that has way too many competing spices vying for your attention, and the overall effect is just gross.

The final painting though still has all the same spices, aspens, flowers and clouds, but they are not competing, they are complimentary. The sky is a miasma of swirling clouds, powerful and foreboding, presaged by the scent of rain and electricity. In the distance, at the edge of an expansive meadow stand the aspen trees, their leaves rustling in the wind that carries the storm. Behind the aspens the cool dark of the pines and the thicker forest, the pines trees thin and spikey and tall in their ascent towards the heavens, making the horizon line jagged.

Pines always grow much taller than aspens. In the natural cycle of the forest, the coniferous trees are a final stage, and when they arrive they choke out the aspens. The entire forest is supposed to burn periodically. Some trees will not even release their seeds until they have been burned. After an area has burned the grass is the first to come back, followed by the aspens and then the pines. Aspens make the necessary shade for the young pines to grow, but are soon choked out by the pine trees’ height and thick foliage. As a result you mainly see aspens at the edges of the forest, at the edges of meadows or rivers. Unfortunately, because people live in the mountains, fires are often suppressed, and as a result the biodiversity of the forest is at risk.

I know this seems like a crazy, mildly educational, and probably super boring tangent, which has nothing to do with the larger point of this post, but stay with me. I will bring it around.

The thing about suppressing the fires is that it not only decreases biodiversity, it can also eventually lead to mega fires, which are not a healthy part of the fire cycle. This happens when the forest goes several decades, if not centuries without burning. The pines keep growing and get dog-haired. This means they are growing so closely together that they are like hair on a dog. A dog-haired forest is sad. All the trees are too close together, so thin and sickly, as they strain ever upward for the precious little light they can reach amidst all the competition.

From my childhood home there are swaths on the neighboring range that burned in my childhood and which are still bare, because the forest had not been allowed to burn for so long, and with so many dog-haired trees, there was too much fuel for the fire. The fire burned too hot and it sterilized the ground.

So fuck Smokey the Bear! No wait, no…. that wasn’t the point.

The point is that sometimes those moments in life that are chaotic and destructive and painful are also in some ways doors to new growth…..so long as the fire doesn’t burn too hot.

After the reign of destruction was wrought upon the original painting, a new painting emerged, one more vibrant and wild, and, yet, also calm. The grass in the meadow is jubilant, dancing. The white yarrows splashed across the green, laughing. The deep purple-blue lupines, the high meadow’s late summer flower, are so deeply colored, so beautifully soft; they seem to ground the whole painting. Around them the world swirls; the clouds, the grass, the aspens, the pines, the wind that rushes through and around all of it. The seasons flash from spring to summer, fall to winter, each year a single inhale and a single exhale. And these late summer flowers are but a mere blink of the world’s eye, yet for a moment, their deep purple-blue echoes the sky after a sunset and sings of the infinite, containing within an instant all the time in the universe. They are the clear note that you can hear above the cacophony of the orchestra. A note which brings harmony to a movement that for one heartbreaking moment felt certain to dissolve into dissonance and chaos.

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