This week I’ve made some progress on the Butterfly No.1 painting, and something quite odd happened as I painted its wings that threw me into thinking about it for a week.
The Wings
I’d been painting the butterfly’s wings with short strokes without thinking, I didn’t plan that at all. I only noticed it when I stood back from the canvas and saw what my hand had actually been doing while I wasn’t thinking about it. A butterfly’s wings are never properly still even when it’s resting on a flower or a piece of grass because they carry on moving slowly in and out and somehow my brush had picked up on that before I had.
It started happening across the whole painting after that, not just the wings. I couldn’t bring myself to paint long strokes or anything but this kind of pitter patter brushstrokes. The only answer I keep landing on is that nothing is actually still and somehow these small brushstrokes were my way of trying to capture this.
The Walk
I needed to stretch my legs after sitting for a few hours painting so I took the dog out and started looking properly at everything around me the way you do when a thought won’t leave you alone. A leaf with no wind on it isn’t still either if you watch it long enough. I filmed a bit of the walk so I’d have something to look back at while I paint. I’ve attached the video below, nothing in it is still, not the water, the path, the sky or the wind. Even standing at my easel thinking I’m holding perfectly steady I’m not because my heart is beating and that pulse is carrying through my hand into the brush whether I want it to or not.
Movement of Thought
It’s not just physical. Thoughts are never still. We’re always moving through them backwards and forwards in a way we can’t do anywhere else in life. In my head I can go back to a memory whenever I like. In real life I can only go forward and there’s no pause button for that. Movement is time and time only moves one way. All that’s left behind afterwards is memory.
How Other Artists Have Shown it.
I started thinking about how other artists have tried to catch movement in something that by its nature doesn’t move at all. Oil paint sits still on a canvas the same as a photograph does so the question is how you make something still feel like it hasn’t stopped.
Doing a bit of research I found that The Futurists spent a lot of time on exactly this. Giacomo Balla painted a dog on a leash with its legs multiplied and overlapping so you see the whole stride of it rather than one frozen step, the same way my strokes built movement into the wing of the butterfly. Umberto Boccioni went about it differently. I was looking at a sketch of his of a cyclist leaning into a bend and the movement there comes from outside the figure with diagonal lines cutting across the background as if the air itself is moving past him. It kind of reminded me of manga art, almost like speed lines. I guess it’s the same idea drawn a hundred years earlier in ink instead of print.
Borrowing From Elsewhere
Then I started thinking about borrowing techniques from other places. I came from design before I came properly to oils and design has never sat still inside one discipline. I went back to look at manga and the way movement gets drawn there is so confident with lines placed outside the figure telling you plainly that something has moved fast. It’s a different language to painting but it’s still working on the same problem I was working on with the butterfly which is how you make a still thing feel like it’s moving.
I think there are two ways into this really. One is what Balla did and what I did without realising it which is movement built into the object itself into the actual brushstroke so you feel it rather than read it. The other is what Boccioni did and what manga does which is marks placed around the form telling you that it moved. I don’t think either one is more honest than the other. They’re just different tools and there’s nothing stopping an oil painter reaching for one that started out somewhere else entirely.
Back to the Movement of the butterfly painting
As I keep painting into the butterfly the sense of movement is going to matter as much as the scene itself and I think it might matter more. The movement will be in the paint itself in the actual gestures of the strokes building up across the canvas.
The sense of movement reminds us that time only goes forward, it is always moving forward. It cannot be paused. “Movement is time and time only moves one way. All that’s left behind afterwards is memory.”
Until next time.