Suffering With Joy

The Horse With One Blue Eye

June 29, 2010

Asti

Suffering with joy means that sometimes you just lie quietly and say the name of Jesus. Sometimes it means taking medicines and supplements that you’d rather not take but you do it anyway to care for your body – and do it cheerfully. Sometimes it means finding something to enjoy at whatever level of functioning you have whether that is puttering in the garden or picking up a skill you’ve always wanted.

For me art and wellness go hand in hand.  Part of my journey to better spirits in spite of chronic pain and fatigue is learning to do digital art – to create beauty however I can. Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are some universal tenets that apply to good art such as the rule of thirds, Divine Proportion, color relationships, and for me, a noble end-purpose which is to show the beauty and order of God’s creation. I’m very much a beginning artist, learning to use tools and opening my mind to all sorts of possibilities.

Last week I was studying a lesson on airbrushing and chose a photograph to paint of my friend Lynn’s black quarter horse, Asti, who has one blue eye. It took a long time – about 3 days – and the deleting of many images before I got this one. I not only wanted to capture her blue eye, I wanted to give a sense of her muscled power and force of personality.

The photograph was taken at high noon in bright sunlight with a 300mm zoom lens on our trusty 35mm film camera with the main focus on the eye.  This made everything in front of and behind the eye out of focus.  I eliminated all the background except what was necessary to give definition to the face where needed and carefully applied layers of paint to make the eye stand out.  The wind was blowing that day and you can see that from the mane, which gives a sense of movement to the picture as does the pose itself with the head and neck angles. Through the use of dark and light I wanted to draw the viewer’s eye in a circle around the painting always landing at Asti’s eye. The bright sun brought out the browns in her coat and face which would otherwise have looked much darker.

A horse’s eye is only a small part of the face, which made this project really challenging.  How could I show what I wanted without distracting elements?  Gaining some mastery of digital airbrush technique helped me a lot. The pose gives the impression that Asti is swinging her head out of the frame directly towards you and I wanted to emphasize that, too.  In the 5×7 or 8×10 size, her blue eye really stands out whereas on this page I couldn’t make an image that large so the eye color is not as impressive.  I guarantee you, though, that if you were standing next to her you wouldn’t miss that cornflower blue.  Go ahead, reach out and pet her on the nose.

Tags: art, joy