Those Magnificent Marks

I can't speak for other farmers, but I can tell you this creative cropper, on occasion, spends hours, even days, searching for just the right mark; the task of making that perfect, authentic simple swipe of creamy color.

  Bold or not. It's a heap tougher than it looks.

 

Now, I'm a modern man with modern moods, but expressing those moods with strokes...well, it just doesn't come that easily.  One moment a farmer can feel tall and strong as a mighty oak, the next he can be as crabby as a crab apple.  It's a thorny adventure.  A prickly game of persistent work...and plumb luck.

When it comes right down to it, I can be mighty hardheaded, stubbornly pushing paint where it doesn't belong.  (And there's plenty of awful evidence of those pieces in the cellar!)  But then my softer side comes out and I give in and let the painting push back.  Gotta chuck the ego, I suppose.  In a peculiar way, you might say I leave myself.  Take a little road trip.

Central Park Pathway, 2010

But when we get along, the paint and me, the result is "Bingo!"  It's a golden moment.  And by golly, right there in those magnificent marks, those swirls of yummy brushwork, I catch a hint of myself.