The May 2015 Challenge
Create a work in four parts, one for each of the four seasons. The sequence can be four stanzas in a poem, four quarters of a drawing, four verses in a song, or whatever strikes your muse. If you decide you need more room to stretch, then you could instead create a sequence of four separate works, like four violin concerti. I hear that’s been done, though.
The Results
Ryan Finholm
Brian Raiter
| sunlight piercing redly | into nacreous glooms | |
| swelter unfolding marigolds | making everything realer | |
| angling under tumulus | umbras moving northward | |
| winds icily nudging | troubling each revealer |
isikyus
Upon the longest night, see it begin:
An artist sleeps beneath a sheet of snow,
Begins to stir, lets thoughts of waking show
— and then decides on months of sleeping in.
What dreams did sketch in simple grey and white,
Awake, she paints. New colours fill the scene,
Replacing snowy hills with verdant green;
And flowers form, from dots of pigment bright.
Then come the rarest tints, for long delayed:
Lapis lazuli gives the bluest sky;
Then certain greens produced from powdered jade,
And lastly gold, as grain begins to dry.
At last, it’s time for art to reap reward:
To view the work complete, she steps away,
But sees the early signs of swift decay.
Lit by the flames, she clears another board…
[…] This is a response to the May 2015 Commuter Challenge […]
Pingback: Painter of the Seasons | Jenkins Rising — 30 May 2015 @ 18:20
My entry isn’t particularly impressive, I fear, but once it had occurred to me I couldn’t resist following it. And I enjoyed the challenge of trying to find a way to invoke each season with only six words.
by Brian — 2 June 2015 @ 11:51
My entry is four original portraits of my husband Andrei in season-themed palettes, from left to right: spring, summer, fall and winter. They are each 11″ x 14″, acrylic paint on canvas. In addition to changing the colors and the perspective from portrait to portrait, I also changed the size of the squares (and the shapes for the final portrait). They each took several hours to complete.
Here’s a list of what didn’t work:
– Due to a mild overuse of green, the winter colors are not different enough from the spring colors.
– I leaned too much on black for shading, so now the paintings look like color grids with black and white drawings superimposed over them.
– Fall and winter are just bad, I need to re-do them.
But I’m pretty happy with how spring and summer turned out.
by RyanF — 3 June 2015 @ 17:33