circus tents

The past week, between weeding people's gardens, sanding/repainting rusty metal chairs (a long-delayed project), and a city day, I painted this oil, 30"x36". Below are 3 detail photos (which I also like as compositions in themselves) and then the complete painting.

 This piece is unusual because one, I don't often work this size (and I loved doing so); two, the image is based not on my own photo or experience, but on someone else's photo I found online. I feel slightly awkward about this, though I suppose other artists/designers do the same. While it is my own hand-drawn and painted composite, I stuck with her perspective & framing. I was inspired by the circus theme of a show a friend is curating, which I may or may not be in (I think she'd need a smaller work). Usually I have the opposite problem, in which my little paintings get lost in a room of larger art.

 The colors differ on the screen, but that's okay. I am interested in the strong graphic nature of the shapes and lines, how they converge, how the vibrant foreground colors fade as they recede in the distance on a cloudy white-sky day.

  I could make a painting just of circus flags and tent tops. I did one years ago of some tents glowing on a dark summer night, from my memory of sitting atop a hill at a music festival. It didn't fit with anything else I was working on at the time. Now I am wondering how to cohere the differing approaches so they are of a whole. Some works establish a distance from you; others pull you in on top of them.

The whole painting. If the photographer somehow comes across this, I hope that it'll be taken in the spirit of a shared visual reference point.. mutual appreciation for a certain perspective. Step right up.