From my skewered perspective

My friend Pam on the tracks

This is not the easiest thing to confess.  I can’t draw perspective.

I can get around this rather striking deficit because I paint in a flat style and I paint in a flat style because I more or less experience life with my nose pressed right against the window pane.

  Everything is big and vibrant and fills the canvas and there’s no room for a lot of foreground, background or sides of buildings.

 But, you’re always going to smack into your drawing shortcomings eventually, and that happened to me when the little painting group I’m in decided last week to render railroad stations and the tracks that run by them.

 This would seem a subject matter pretty easy to sidestep – arguably very easy to sidestep, but the Essex (Connecticut) Art Association is having a juried show at the Valley Railroad in Essex and all art submitted must depict an aspect of this enterprise.

 A locomotive under full steam seemed a lot more daunting to render than the tiny train stations in the picturesque towns the tracks pass through  so we set up opposite one of these little guys recently.

 Aside from coming narrowly close to being flattened by the train as it unexpectedly wheezed by filled with tourists craning to see why four grandmother-aged women were putting themselves in harm’s way, there was no way to avoid perspective. Given the requirements of the show, it was pretty necessary to make the one-room, 100-year-old building look more or less like it looks.

 It was really hard for me. It’s an awful painting and though I took pictures, measured , held my pain brush parallel to I’m not sure what and scanned a couple of books on perspective, I couldn’t get it right and finally took it a critique night.

 There, Ishita, the artist doing the critique,  – an artist, by the way,  who does non-representational encaustic paintings and collages - gently explained perspective.

 This caused me to talk Joyce, another artist who gives occasional workshops in perspective, to schedule one next month. But, I couldn’t wait that long so I took my horrible painting and a blue magic marker to Joyce a couple of days ago.

 Right now, I could photograph my painting laced with Joyce’s many blue lines, but I’m too embarrassed.

  That’s not fair. I’ve plunged this far into confession, I might as well wallow. Here it is: