Ok, so this one is called, The Still of the Night. It is actually the view from the front steps of the house that I grew up in, in North Philly. I remember sitting out there in the summer time. I didn't really have a bed time when a lot of my friends did so I would be left alone when they all had to go in. I remember it being a little chilly and very quiet, for the most part and kind of lonely. If my mom was home, she was upstairs, but usually she wasn't back then. Usually it was just my dad sitting in the living room, either asleep in front of the t.v. or actually watching it. It was kind of lonely and a little scary but it was comforting to look inside and see the light and the warmth and knowing that I could go inside anytime I wanted, (I was weird like that).
This is exactly the view as I remember it. When I told some family what the picture was of, they asked, "But how do you know what it looked like there?" It's simple for me, I can see the picture in my head exactly as it was. Right down to the steel scraper that was next to a lot of old houses, where people used to scrape the crud off their shoes before going inside. Our scraper was actually the only one that was intact. The abandoned candy factory across the street that burned down when I was a kid. And don't forget the trolley tracts in the street.
I thought using different shades of of blue for the whole painting was quite fitting. I wasn't really sure how to convey the feeling of loneliness I used to get sitting out there, but the blue really seemed to help.
I recently showed some of my work to a new friend of mine and he also asked me, as someone else once did, why there is so much blue in my work. On one hand I do love to paint the sky and there is usually a lot of blue in the sky. On the other hand I think blue is a very emotional color and I am a very emotional person, so I think it's pretty fitting. Maybe I will get to a point in my life where the most prominent color in my paintings is pink, red, or yellow. I guess, for now, it may just be a phase I am going through. Even Picasso had his blue period....right?
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
