This is one of my all-time favorites.
Sometimes I forget about images that I made awhile back. Majestic Rain is one of them. It’s one of my all-time favorites so it’s surprising that I would forget about it….but I did.
Kim Pogue (at First Edition Prints) prints all my reproductions for me. I take the original paintings over to her with the digital files and she painstakingly color corrects the files to match the originals, so that I can sell prints of my originals. This one she loved so much that I left it hanging in her studio for the last couple of years.
Only recently when I had a show did I get it back from her. And DANG, I really do love this painting.
I had met my friend Juliann for dinner one night and had fallen in love with her boots. Yes, this image all stemmed from the love of Juliann’s boots! I had never worked with a ‘model’ before and she had never done any modeling. But I knew I wanted to get an image of her with those boots.
We headed over to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis where part of the building has large pieces of reflective metal on it. And we just played around. It was really early on in my encaustic career and had no idea where any of this was going to go. But we had a blast. And as I said, I loved those boots.
This painting is a reflection on the wall of Juliann in her boots
I don’t always look at early work and pat myself on the back. But when I picked this painting up from Kim I literally sat and marveled at the background. I realized that my backgrounds had strayed a bit under the pressure of people always telling me to put color in my work. It’s not where my heart is. And it’s seeing this image again that has me going back to my roots of creating black & white paintings.
There is now a print of this image hanging on my studio wall….. I don’t want to forget about it again.
With all good wishes,
