Run for your lives - it is abstraction!!

Steve Durbin of Art and Perception has a good eye for photography. He photographs a lot of nature in and around his home in Montana. He knows about my interest in painting faces and about three months back on a whim he asked me if I saw any faces in this picture of his. He had photographed rocks outcroppings (I must say some of the shapes were pretty eerie looking) at an area known as the Devil’s Garden at the Arches National Park. Poetically he plans to call these 'Bones of the Earth' - a fascinating concept as the rocks indeed function as the 'bones' of our mater earth...

Original picture

I looked at the picture and told him that I indeed did see some faces staring back at me. Last week, he asked me if I could have a go at painting faces that I saw in the rocks and this is what happened.

I took the original image above, inverted it completely, studied the contrast levels by looking at areas that contain the greatest shifts in contrast and decided to paint faces that I saw in the inverted rocks.

Inverted rocks

'Zephyrus Cupid and Phyche', Oil on canvas, 24 " X 36"

I remember thinking that each of us sees the nature around us in different ways and this was just one way to look at it. I also remember thinking looking up to the sky on cloudy days and trying to decipher and attribute the wondrous figures that form ever so ephemerally in the ethereal reaches of the upper atmosphere and then so suddenly shift away in the winds. I saw Zephyrus Cupid and Phyche playing on the canvas when it was complete.