Concerning rabbits and the importance of experimentation

Much of painting is about trying to find some little piece of magic which will make the piece come to life and take on meaning beyond the image. I find myself occasionally struggling along and then somehow, after periods of despair that it has been a wasted effort, manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat. That eureka moment can come from any direction. Recently while painting a landscape, the moment came from a mode of abstraction used to render the sensation of leaves overhead, creating a mass of flatness and volume..



And other times i know i've got a few tricks up my sleeves to help solve a given situation, but wary of the gimmickyness factor that can squash the essence of discovery that i hope to achieve in each piece. A trick repeated too often looses its magic. In the weeks prior to painting this landscape, i had been working on some abstractions (for fun) that seemed to me to be not much more than pretty "art by the yard" process painting. It was a revisiting to a prior mode of picture making that once held my passion, but couldn't seem to come to a point of true fruit.