Jumpers

40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2019

This painting is based on a photo I took at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Fort Macleod, Alberta. I find skeletons and skulls fascinating (we all have at least one, after all) and when I saw this wall display of dozens of buffalo skulls I was mesmerized by the patterns, shapes, shadows, and sheer volume of bones.

Here's how that place got its name. It's a coincidence, of course, but I think it's wonderfully appropriate that this was done over top a failed painting I was calling Gravity Loves to Win (see below). Maybe I should have kept that title for this painting...maybe I still could...

Detail.

My technique on this painting is different from my normal cross-hatch-style of brushwork, largely because I started blocking in shadows with an older brush, giving me a softer look...and I just kept going like that with very little cross-hatching. I did go back in with some sharply-defined darks and highlights, but having a nice looseness with those older brushes, I wanted to maintain that look. This soft-and-loose approach is most likely a one-off as I don't know if it would lend itself to other paintings I have in mind. We'll see...

Pencils.

At this stage, things were kind of hard to see since I didn't apply a thick enough coat of gesso to cover the previous painting. But with some concentration and patience, I was able to figure out pretty much what was what and blocked-in my forms and shadows accordingly.

Salad days.

While composing this image in Photoshop out of four different elements, I thought this would be an interesting and elaborate –maybe even an improved– version of my original watercolour painting (see below). Although, I couldn't decide which way it should go for a long time, finally settling on this horizontal orientation just before ditching the whole project.

Then the movie Gravity came out (I still haven't seen it, by the way) which apparently featured a woman falling to earth from orbit at some point and I kind of lost interest (even though my image was completely unrelated to that movie and the title is a line from 32, a song by Wild Strawberries (again, see my watercolour painting from 1998). I set aside this painting still in this drawing-and-orange-ground stage for a few years (but only partly because of the movie; other projects took precedence).

I blocked in some shadows in the figure in 2016 during a photoshoot with a local photographer, but then set the painting aside for another long stretch while I again worked on other, more pressing projects.

I admit: I lost track of my printed photo reference (and found it again) a few times over the years after I'd set up the painting, and my computer suffered a catastrophic crash in 2014, leaving me with no digital version. That's no excuse, but I gravitated (no pun intended) to relatively "easier" projects rather than digitally rebuilding that composition. I do have that printed reference now, though.

I resumed painting this last year and it looked like it was going well, what with my new interest in glazing...and I liked those clouds...but it wasn't quite coming together and I was reminded of another failed painting from a few years ago which also featured the same model and also was another oil variation of a previous watercolour painting (which had its own oil variation already). So I started having reservations about this painting...

Then, early this year, I was looking through my photos for ideas and came across my photo of the wall of buffalo skulls I'd shot back in the previous decade and decided to recycle Gravity Loves to Win and do what I'd hoped would be (and did turn out to be) a much better painting. Huzzah.

Gravity Loves to Win

32" x 40", oil on canvas
(2012-2018 –unfinished, recycled)

And here is the watercolour painting I did in 1998:

Gravity Loves to Win

22" x 15", watercolour, 1998