Untitled
Oil. My sister-in-law asked me to do a painting for her house, which is somewhat lacking in décor. But she had a specific request: the painting should prominently feature a unicorn, as her daughters were going through a unicorn phase at the time. Although I initially demurred, I became inspired despite myself, and quickly set to work after securing an agreement whereby I could select the painting’s location (in this case, in the middle of a brick pattern above the fireplace illuminated by angled can lights - a place of honor if ever there was one). I selected a canvas to perfectly fit in the space - an expensive museum-quality 24”x36” that is the biggest painting I’ve ever done.
Anyway, I resolved that if I was to do a “unicorn painting”, it would be the most virile, masculine looking unicorn ever seen, and in that respect, I succeeded: it looks like it was sculpted out of titanium, all strength and no softness, a steed ready to do battle, prancing resolutely down a flagstone path to some meaningful destination. And I settled on a specific color palette, that I called “Tuscan” (since Italian stuff is manly, I suppose): brown and olive and gold, with cool blue to set off the warm earth tones. No reds, pinks, purples…. Sure, this painting was for girls, but there would be nothing “girly” about it!
The composition has a deliberate symmetry, not just object-wise where the center is flanked by dark foliage, but color-wise top-to-bottom: the blue of the sky appears in the flowers at the bottom, the off-white of the clouds mirrors the coat of the unicorn, the gold of the distant mountain summit is countered by the gold of the path and assorted stone in the foreground, with green occupying the middle, just above and below the horizon.
The part I am most satisfied with, though, is the background. The distant fortress hugging the mountainside swathed in mist, catching the sun piercing the gaps between the peaks, the even more distant clouds slowly roiling above it all - I almost wanted that to be a painting in-and-of-itself. The end result exudes a certain stateliness, a sense of mystique and a whiff of formality like those late-medieval tapestries that so often do incorporate unicorns. In a final magnanimous gesture I let the nieces compose a title for the painting, but the name they chose is so undignified and silly that I failed to commit it to memory and thus the work remains “Untitled”.
Anyway, I resolved that if I was to do a “unicorn painting”, it would be the most virile, masculine looking unicorn ever seen, and in that respect, I succeeded: it looks like it was sculpted out of titanium, all strength and no softness, a steed ready to do battle, prancing resolutely down a flagstone path to some meaningful destination. And I settled on a specific color palette, that I called “Tuscan” (since Italian stuff is manly, I suppose): brown and olive and gold, with cool blue to set off the warm earth tones. No reds, pinks, purples…. Sure, this painting was for girls, but there would be nothing “girly” about it!
The composition has a deliberate symmetry, not just object-wise where the center is flanked by dark foliage, but color-wise top-to-bottom: the blue of the sky appears in the flowers at the bottom, the off-white of the clouds mirrors the coat of the unicorn, the gold of the distant mountain summit is countered by the gold of the path and assorted stone in the foreground, with green occupying the middle, just above and below the horizon.
The part I am most satisfied with, though, is the background. The distant fortress hugging the mountainside swathed in mist, catching the sun piercing the gaps between the peaks, the even more distant clouds slowly roiling above it all - I almost wanted that to be a painting in-and-of-itself. The end result exudes a certain stateliness, a sense of mystique and a whiff of formality like those late-medieval tapestries that so often do incorporate unicorns. In a final magnanimous gesture I let the nieces compose a title for the painting, but the name they chose is so undignified and silly that I failed to commit it to memory and thus the work remains “Untitled”.