Pilgrimage Year: July, acrylic on panel, 24 x 16 in. ©2004 Cynthia L Morefield

Hello, July!

In this 2½-min audio recording I tell the story of the painting Pilgrimage Year: July.

Listen here

If you prefer to read, here’s the text version:

This is Pilgrimage Year: July, the seventh painting in the Pilgrimage Year series. It’s one of several in the series that were based on a particular place and event.

Music & Mountains

In this case the event was a trip that my mom and my sister and I took in July of 2003, a year before I made this piece, and on that trip we visited several music festivals in New England. It was a fabulous trip — we had a great time and made lots of good memories! This painting was inspired by Tanglewood, an outdoor music venue in the Berkshires in Massachusetts [where we saw Van Cliburn playing Beethoven!]. I wanted to give the sense of this beautiful outdoor area in the summertime where people are gathering to hear beautiful music. The area at the top — the white bars at the top with the red spatter — was my attempt to represent music notes on a staff, but in a very nonliteral way. The spatters at the bottom abstractly represent the gathering of people. This isn’t taken from a photograph of an actual mountain scene, or anything like that — it’s totally from my memory and impression of the place.

Is that blood?

Another thing that I’m asked a lot about this piece, and couple other pieces in the series, too, is actually about those red spatters up at the top. I’m asked, “What’s up with the blood at the top?” The first time I was asked that I was very surprised, because it had actually never occurred to me that that could read as blood! Once somebody said it, it became very obvious – Well, of course! It’s red, it’s spattered, it’s dripping — somebody could very reasonably read that as blood. However that wasn’t part of the idea for me; I use red a lot, and I choose it because its color and vibrancy is what’s needed in the composition.

That’s some of the story behind Pilgrimage Year: July. This painting is available to purchase; contact me if you’d like to spend some more time with it.

If there are paintings you’d like to hear more about, let me know in the comments and I’ll put them in the queue!

Pilgrimage Year: June, ©2004 Cynthia L Morefield. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 16 in.

Happy June!

In this 5-min audio recording I tell the story of the painting Pilgrimage Year: June. Listen here. If you prefer to read, the transcription follows.

This painting is available to purchase; contact me if you’re interested.

The Story

Pilgrimage Year:June is the sixth painting in the Pilgrimage Year series. In this piece I was really trying to evoke a sense of warmth and growth using the motifs and techniques that had become integral to the series by this time. As a result, I pushed these motifs and techniques in new directions.

Window Panes

I began the Pilgrimage Year series in 2003, and my original intent was to create one painting per month and finish the series in a year. That didn’t quite happen – I actually finished it in 2004 and worked on this particular painting in 2004. By the time I got to this piece, the sixth one, the series was already well under way, of course. One of the specific motifs that had shown up was the window panes, and this was influenced by these incredible windows that I had in my studio space at the time in Harrisonburg, VA. The space itself left a lot to be desired – it was cold and damp, and made of concrete – but it had these really really great windows. I didn’t set out intentionally to make paintings of windows, but the window shapes just kind of showed up and I really liked them and kept using them. In this particular piece I wanted to make the window motif a little bit different, come at it a different way, so I really zoomed in on it. What you’re seeing here – the white horizontal and vertical bars in the foreground of the piece – would be the corner intersection of one set of mullions for the windows, as if you were looking through the window outward. The window pane motif is there, but zoomed in and disguised a little bit compared to the previous pieces.

Iridescent Drips

Another technique that became very integral to this series was dripping paint – both actually dripping paint onto the panel or putting on a layer of paint and then dripping through that with water or other paint to create these organic but still linear effects. I did a lot of dripping in this piece, but one element that was different, and it’s hard to see in this image, but up at the top there’s a very very light blue layer that is dripped on over the yellow, and that color has an iridescent paint in it which gives it a shimmer. Iridescence was one way to increase the quality of light and warmth in this piece in addition to the colors, which of course are very warm, but the iridescence adds some reflectivity.

Another technique in this piece that was a little bit different relates to how the window pane motif was created. In the previous pieces I created the window panes by using a wet sanding sponge to sand out the window pane shapes. In this one I reversed it and sanded out the cross pieces as opposed to the panes. That’s something I used later on in the series as well, in October and November, sanding out the crosspieces instead of the panes themselves.

Mountains & Trees

This piece is less abstract than the previous five pieces in the series. There is very definite landscape feel, with the mountains and the tree forms in the piece, and mountains and trees and branches and those kinds of things show up a lot in my work. Mountains are very important to me, I love to be in the mountains, so it’s something that shows up a lot, not necessarily in highly realistic form but just as a motif. And trees, of course, very naturally represent growth, but also stability and strength.

Another way I tried to get a sense of a brightness and lightness was by scratching into the surface, another technique I use a lot in my work. Hence the name of my studio, Scratching the Surface Studio! Where you can see it in this painting is right above that first line of hills down at the bottom – there are very thin vertical white marks and those are actually scratched into the surface of the painting.

That’s some of the story of Pilgrimage Year:June, and I thank you very much for spending some time with me and with this painting.