All of nature seems so much more complex, on second look.
Consider the spider’s web.
I see it move away from me on a horizontal plane. The tracery of net all wiggly confusion. But is it really? I look again and there is a pattern to the thickness of the stands. A few seemingly major highways with some feeder roads, the intersections appearing as complicated roundabouts. How to draw something disappearing in space?
The spider’s web is over plants, twigs and flowers. These dissolve into blurry shapes and textures. And yet all of these are at different levels of focus. So how to show levels of focus besides just blurring edges?
If the web strands are in focus, then nothing else can be that clear, and yet the threads are also going in and out of focus. Complexity squared. How much detail is necessary to create an illusion of space?
And what of the spider her/himself? They are above the web, and so in the sharpest focus. The closer one looks, the more detail is available for seeing. In this painting exam, the focus is not on itty bitty squiggles so much as on a quality of surface. So how to paint translucency?
This painting is #20 of the 47 dream paintings I challenged myself to do at the beginning of 2018. The question came in a dream and is part of the Journey Oracle divination deck I created, but this image as its answer is way beyond my simple yes or no. At first glance, “How can there be order in this maze of lines?” On reflection, “Maybe, because if one knows where to focus, a path appears.”
Have you taken a wrong turn?
