Pausing and Waiting for the New Dawn

Beginning of an Abandoned House in Rural Whitesboro, Texas

“They were miserable men who were granted a few moments of transcendence and they had the talent and foresight to grab pen and paper and write it down.”

Line from the motion picture “Liberal Arts”–Dr. Fairfield, Professor of Romantics, assessing the British Romantic poets.

I am thrilled to begin my first three-day weekend of the summer school stretch.  Finishing at 12:45 today, I went home, slumped in a chair, and suddenly had no intiative–why is it that I want to be most creative when I have a demanding schedule to keep?!  I don’t answer the bell till next Monday morning, yet here I sat, in my chair, feeling inert.  Turning to a TV recording of a motion picture I captured last week (and I absolutely love it!), I laughed at the line posted above, realizing how much truth rings in it.  I then re-opened my volume of Thoreau’s Journal to my bookmark and resumed reading where I had left off early this morning:

When my imagination travels eastward and backward to those remote years of the gods, I seem to draw near to the habitation of the morning, and the dawn at length has a place.  I remember the book as an hour before sunrise.

There it was: the dawn.  I recalled all the wonderful things I had read from Thoreau’s Walden about the dawn as a metaphor for that moment of the day when he was most (creatively) awake.  It was time for me to wake up to the dawn.  So . . . I returned to the studio and began this piece posted above.  This is the house I lived in during a 9-month span of 1984-85.  It is sadly abandoned now and ready to collapse.  I returned there a few years ago and took more than a dozen reference photos for potential watercolor studies.  Finally I am getting down to one (actually, I did paint it immediately after the photo shoot, and promptly sold the painting; and now wish I still had it).  So far the piece is moving along pretty quickly.  I don’t plan to spend too many days on it.  There are some technique and compositional matters I want to pursue, so here is an excuse.

Thanks for reading.  It’s a good feeling, being “awake” again.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

 

 

Tags: Whitesboro