I wrote two earlier blog posts about this painting. Or rather: about this subject. Because there were multiple interations of it. You can read the blog posts (see bottom of this page) and they will tell you the complete backstory, with photo references, to underline my struggles to create this painting.
Here is the story…
I have said it before, I often use my photography to commit a scene to memory, so that I can make it into a painting someday. This is what happened during a 4-week trek through the Himalayan mountains in the early nineties.
On my way to Everest Basecamp in Nepal, I walked past some delapitated little houses and something popped up in the corner of my eyes. I looked and stopped walking immediately. Took off my backpack, grabbed my camera and took a very dark and blurry picture of… the interior of a house. The house must have had a hole in its ceiling, because what I saw was sunbeams INSIDE this house. I was working with a traditional camera with film, with few low-light features and without a tripod. But I did not care. The scene was mesmerizing. Sunbeams in a house, I had not seen that before, not in this way. I was in the process of putting my camera away, when, to my utter surprise, a child suddenly jumped right into the sunbeams as if it had magically materialised. The child was giggling at me and the scene became even more delightful. So I quickly aimed my camera once more at this house and took another shot. I knew it was going to be blurry and bad but again, I wanted to commit this moment to memory.
The print of this photograph was dreadful but it did serve its purpose. I never forgot the scene.
Now fast forward to my painting years here in Canada, that started in 2016, a mere 23 years later. My photo album of my Nepal-adventure had by then go missing. I ‘only’ moved house 25 times, including our move to St Thomas, so it is likely that it got lost during one of those moves. Lucky for me, I did hold on to all my old negatives and one day I decided to scan them to be able to see those pictures again. Including the sunbeam shots.
When scanning negatives these days, technology allows us to see much more than in the old-fashioned prints of yonder years. I was able to tweak both shots and to my surprise it turned out that there was not only a child in the sunbeams, but that there was a female in the background that I had never noticed before! All the more reason to grab my paints and get cracking.
I have now behind me 5 efforts of painting the scene. I am not even sure that I am done yet. The trouble with the scene is that so much is implied by the dark background and so little is visible. And from what it visible, it is hard to explain what I was actually seeing on that day.
Sunbeams can be painted in different ways. I tried acrylic spray. I tried airbrush. I tried brushwork. Each time I made a new effort, the child and what I assume is the mother got a new face. This was, after all, not about getting a likeness per se. I just wanted to do the scene justice.
Click in the list below to select and view more backstories of my artworks.