Till the Last Ray Gleams, ©John O’Grady 2014
Oil on deep edged canvas 12″ x 12″ x 1.75″
It does not require framing and is ready to hang.
NFS
The days start their steady progression towards summer. Little by little, we have more daylight.
On this short winter day, I awoke to a sky grey and low and even now as I write this and the evening closes in, the light has remained at this level all day.
This is of course all part of the balancing of one season with another; maybe summer evenings wouldn’t hold their magic if the dark of winter wasn’t there as a counterbalance.
This painting came out today full of the life-giving energy of the blessed star around which we orbit as if to herald that onward march to summer.
The title is a borrowed line from the poem Song at Sunset by Walt Whitman with thanks.
I hope you enjoy it, please let me know.
Wonderful, vibrant color, John. You are a miraculous dreamer to imagine this on a grey winter’s day!! I’ve just come from my first look at the refurbished Harvard Art Museums (formerly The Fogg, Sachler, and Busch-Reisinger). They have on show a series by Mark Rothko using some of your palette though in a different way. I love the purply/ raisin and tangerine/ reds together. Thank you for warming up my day.
Hello Rachel,
You are very welcome, glad that it had a warming effect, although the purity and vibrancy of colour of the Rothko’s on show would I imagine warm anyone’s heart, what a fabulous experience. Thank you for your comment on the painting a touch of daydreaming can be beneficial.
I had never read the Whitman poem before; thank you for posting the link. It is an ecstatic embrace of everything on earth, and that ecstasy is reflected here. I have the sense of being able to observe even the curve of the Earth from this vantage point — a trick of the mind, I suppose, or just an effect of the expansiveness of the emotion that the colors and the light evoke here. It’s as though the eye is suddenly acutely susceptible to all the beauty there is — and in it rushes! Breathtaking.
Hello Josephine,
It is the perfect poem I think for a grey overcast day. That ‘ecstatic embrace’ is so life affirming. Thank you for your comment on the painting, the curve you mentioned draws the viewer in quickly I think, through the piece as you so perceptively said it ‘Rushes in’ as the energy from the colour and light rush out at us, hopefully colliding at some point.
Yes — I meant that the beauty rushes into the eye, and into the consciousness, though there is a meeting in the middle of the beauty and the viewer!
Thanks Josephine, I misunderstood that part, that makes it all the more richer
Hello John, I looked again at ‘Til the Last Ray Gleams’ this morning – and I am very glad I did! Outside it is one of the those grey overcast days that you refer to and the warm burst of colour and energy that greeted me was very welcome. It encouraged me to look up towards the brow of the hill and that incredible sunset and stay there for a while. Thank you.
p.s. It is now raining but I still have the vibrant glow in my mind’s eye!
Thank you Christine,
I am glad it brightened your day