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Moon shadow

Paint your shadows a light as possible, as rich in colour as possible, and as flat as possible.

Think, I said in class, of the moon in the daytime. Just what colour is the shadow side of the moon? Visualise it, how much detail do we have?.. and I had to stop, because the beauty of the daytime moon overwhelmed me.

Detial, none; outline, none; all is lost, merged, dissolved. And a colour; nowhere. All that is, is the colour of the sky, the pale beautiful emptiness... flat and void and blue, and luminous. Perfection which is ruptured by the hint of information. There is nothing, just the presence of beauty, if we could paint the moon as God paints her. An edge to its amberwhite, and a merging.

My sometime teacher

She was a quiet young woman, not unfriendly, not snooty, just... you know... French.

I never knew her name. And yet, she taught me the single greatest lesson in art, and the reason why I won't use the word "background". When, after three months, the professor and the assistant professor appeared to look at our work, they singled out my painting of a dove. They liked the painting in general, but they were most unimpressed with the background, a what-I-took-to-be delicate tinted grey. She came across to congratulate me, but I was less than generous in response.

"What do they expect me to do? If I cannot paint beauty, I would rather stop painting. If not beauty, what am I supposed to paint?"

She stood for a moment, considering, then...

"How about truth?" she said.

My new website.

I have spent the last few days rebuilding my website, and to make available for sale some of my recent works. The website is at http://artistvision.org and it includes my blog.

Please have a look, and do drop me a line.

July course, 6 months.

The next life and portrait painting course in oils, will run from 20th July till 23rd November at the Kalk Bay Community Centre.

Monday mornings, 20 sessions of 2 hours.

For details, please phone me at (021) 786 3975.

The gift of vision

The great skill is not painting, nor even drawing, but seeing.

It is strange, when we look back, how formative our early experience is, or, how our life path seems to be mapped out in advance, and how, at the right time, the right teacher appears. In some way, it is as if we kno where we are going even before birth, but we still have to find the path.

It was in standard 7. We had that one teacher, our English teacher, the one who inspires one student in fifty. He challenged us with subjects for our essays. One was "If I could have anything."

At the time I had no idea about art or about being an artist, I just knew that this was my choice:

If I could have anything, I would like to learn to see. Really to see.

Website

http://artistvision.org/

Workshops

For details on workshops and classes in Cape Town and Europe, click here

The mustard seed.

I peered at the mustard seeds in the palm of my hand.

"Now I understand why the Bible says that if we had the faith of a mustard seed..." and Swami
Venkatesananda turned on me. "No you don't!", he whispered. Then, I knew.

The mustard seed knows. It knows what it is.

The art of Ryno Swart