Time and Tides

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Yesterday I spent on the front porch of a local restaurant working on a watercolor of the buildings on the opposite side of the street.

I remembered as I worked that the last time I had such an experience was from a garret balcony in Montmarte almost 30 years ago.

It’s not that I haven’t made art. I have. I have made pieces both digital and traditional, for personal enjoyment and for profit (and luckily sometimes both). But to sit down with no other intention than to make a record of the scene in front of me hasn’t been something I’ve done in too long a time.


The exercise is not just to work in the wild, but to determine how to execute the image with the tools at hand. While I have a full set of the Derwent Inktense pencils and blocks, the paint pans, similar to a watercolor tin, only has about a third of the colors. Yes, I can, and did, expand that with the bigger gamut of the pencils, I was quite surprised that the colors didn’t really have the subtle faded pink, sage green, and yellow ochres of the scene. Choosing how to interpret the scene is the artist’s process.

Frankly that’s my own damned fault, and my own damned vanity. Working from life is a core competency of the professional artist, and it’s my own laziness that I’ve not invested the time to get out there and do it.

The spontaneity and interaction with both the subject and the working environment are essential to any one claiming to be competent with their media. So yesterday was a return to the practice, and I expect to be spending more time engaged in it, even if the final pieces are not spectacular or commercially viable.

Today I am in studio, working on various projects that are a good deal more structured. This is not simply because I am shifting media back to oils, which of necessity are not as spontaneous. It is because the nature of the imagery requires a more “engineered” method.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There will doubtless be some times where working in the open air with a live scene will require a certain deliberated method. And likewise, even a very complex and arranged studio piece will benefit from the occasional happy accident that may take it in a completely different direction.

Magic, of course has some parallels. The seat of the pants “what’s in the cupboard” approach of practical witchcraft is analogous to the plein air impression of the live street. And certainly the heavily structured rituals of so-called “high magick” has commonality with the premeditated studio work. Yet they both partake of and inform each other.

The intended outcome is, of course, the primary yardstick for the efficacy of method. In my long practice I have almost always wiggled along somewhere in the middle of both, but I confess I’ve had more freedom and courage to trust the wildness of traditional improvisational witchcraft than to be comfortable with facing the changing light of a street scene or landscape. And for that I chastise myself.


The studio piece has been worked out from rough sketch through a geometric design in the computer. The final will be hand painted, and will hopefully be more representative of a freer approach, but the use of structured technology as a step in that creation is something that I have been doing for quite a while. The patience required to cut out and apply the masks comes from commercial illustration projects, which ironically hardly employ these methods in the digital age. In essence I am utilizing a hybrid archaic process that has been superceded by layering and masking digitally. The method is still the standard for much airbrush work, but for the majority of illustration it’s become a forgotten art.

It’s never too late for the old dog to go back and relearn some tricks.

That’s all I have this week. If you find it a tad brief, I invite you to join me and Clever Kim on Your Average Witch Podcast this Tuesday, April 16, where I ramble on about a number of topics. I’m looking forward to seeing what she was able to edit together from my typical puddle of consciousness conversations.

Till next week, then. At least I’ll try to. 

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