Flying Girl Searches for Fellowship, or Clique

Flying Girl Searches for Fellowship, 9/21/08, Golden Fluid Acrylics

This was a simple painting. Prompted from Illustration Friday's "Clique." Sky, earth, the girl, and the small circle of people below. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of certain circles of bloggers who keep managing to go on these amazing outings with awesome women, and I would love to be doing something similar right now but am just not in the place to do so. Right now, that is.

But I didn't read the prompt from that place of exclusion that you might think of cliques. The HS cool kids. Exclusion. And I don't feel like I am really on the outside of those bloggers I admire. Well, maybe a little, but I don't think it says something fundamental about who I am.

Whatever my inspiration, when I painted it, boy did it feel plain. Everything seemed so flat and bland. So in walked my, "what can I do to mess this up/fix this" brain and instead of adding detail and shadow or deepening colors or sketching out features or writing words I said, "I think I'll try to pale-ify it even more and washed it with white.

Woosh! Something clicked. (haha. click. clique) and it started to make sense. I liked the ephemeral quality. I liked it being indistinct. It was a touch too pale and cool, so I thought it could use another wash of color, and searching through my bag o' paints found Quinacridone Gold and added water to make it even sheerer (I could have used gel medium, but that would have meant going upstairs to get it.) A wash of that solved the coolness and added an almost antiquey look and dirtied it up a bit. I liked that. And last touch, a halo of white around the figures.

In the end, it is unclear what is actually happening here. Is Flying Girl flying, or standing? Is the group/clique flying or standing? Is that the ground or is it the sea? Is it the horizon or a range of mountains in the distance? I like that the boundaries are indistinct. Maybe that's the way human relations are in life. There is no black and white, really, no us vs. them, just souls trying to make the best of what they have.

Is Flying Girl going to meet these people? Are they waiting for her? Or is she simply flying by, watching, from a distance?

Who knows? The answer is unclear. The outcome is hazy. Magic eightball... what will become of Flying Girl?

Ask again tomorrow, when you turn in for the next installment in the Adventures of Flying Girl... same flying time, same flying channel.

(Oh, and did I mention how much I didn't want to do this painting? I even thought about posting one I had already painted but didn't much like as my daily painting. But I thought that would kind of be cheating. So I sat down with the paints to see what I could do, to see how long I could keep up this painting a day. Will I do another tonight when it has to compete with the new season of Heroes? Who knows, the answer is unclear. Tune in tomorrow, same flying time... you know the drill.)