Ruined Church amid Foliage,
San Juan Capistrano
Robert Winter, 2005

Acrylic on  Canvas Board
18" x 24"

Giclee Print:   $400
On Sheet Canvas, Unframed

Framed Original:  Not currently for sale

Artist's Notes

Sometimes it seems like this was just meant to be a ruin.

The old stone church at the Mission San Juan Capistrano tumbled down in an earthquake shortly after it was built.  I doubt that it would have been as affecting in its intact state as it is now.

In this view, the vegetation serves as a kind of foil to the church--something produced by nature, rather than by human craftsmen.

Technically, this painting reflects some looser and more open depiction techniques that I’ve used in line drawings, and that I’m now working to apply to the medium of paint. 

You may notice that there’s not a continuous line separating the stone walls from the sky.  It’s paradoxical, but somehow, when the walls seem to just materialize from thin air, they gain a kind of weight and presence. 

There are also varying levels of detail in the painting.  The stone walls have a fair degree of detail, as does the taller vegetation toward the back and left of the scene, but the foreground greenery toward the right of the painting is so simplistically rendered that it could almost be folk art--or the work of a small child. 

I’m finding that variations between polished and simple depiction techniques, like shifts between open and dense renderings, somehow increase the sense of life in a painting.  Maybe the underlying principle is that when more fully formed things emerge from a less differentiated “primordial soup,” they tend to have an increased vividness and dramatic presence.

Then again, maybe it’s a matter of more closely reflecting how our brains process visual experiences.  Unlike cameras, which render every object in a scene with equal detail, our brains seem to be more selective about the amount of detail they choose to acknowledge for each element.   It could be that rendering a scene in the more selective way the brain processes it, rather than the way a camera records it, increases the sense of actually being there.

Another factor is that I just want you to see brushstrokes.  Painting is a form of conjuring, and the more transparent the illusion is, the more fun it is.

 

© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.