The Duck and the Dulcimer Player

"The Duck and the Dulcimer Player" is my first attempt at drawing inspiration from my long history experiencing "pareidolia"-- the psychological tendency to perceive a familiar pattern or meaning in random, meaningless stimuli.  Many people experience pareidolia when looking at random cloud or rock formations, for example. 

For as long as I can remember, I see faces and animals in just about everything I look at that's not already a face or an animal.  When I was a little kid growing up, my bedroom had this off-white tightly woven sculpted carpet.  I would spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the carpet to find all the faces and animal shapes staring back at me.  I could see hundreds of familiar shapes without even trying.  A veritable menagerie all around me. 

Taking this cognitive tendency to a constructive level, I decided to rely on pareidolia to help me compose this latest canvas.  Like the sculpted carpet in my childhood bedroom. 

I started by applying a thick coat of plaster to a primed canvas, then used a variety of tools to make random marks, shapes, and strokes without any thought for the resulting patterns.  Once the plaster dried, I lightly sanded it with fine sandpaper, then covered the dried plaster with a thick coat of gesso and let it dry overnight.

The dried plaster didn't present any hints as to where this painting was going at this point.  But I could clearly make out different shapes and impressions in the plaster that got me excited for what still lay hidden from my perception.

The next steps involved completely covering the canvas with wet, fluid paint colors and working them into the sculpted surface using water, a bristle broom, and a squeegee.  Each layer of paint started to give the modeled surface enough color and value contrast that I could tell my pareidolia was kicking in.  Four layers went down before I could make out the distinct outline of a bird and a human figure wearing a cowboy hat. 

From there, the rest is what you can see in the finished painting.

Obviously, I took several imaginative leaps to get from these initial impressions to the finished painting.  It wasn't like painting inside the lines of a coloring book. But there were plenty of hints along the way.  Enough hints that I could slowly develop a story to flesh out the two main characters in the painting, which enabled me to move the painting composition in a distinct direction.  

That direction turned into a painting about a good ole country boy playing his dulcimer for his singing duck.  The two of them strumming and singing some folk song about Jonah being swallowed by a whale.  Or something along those lines.  

The entire process gave me the opportunity to experiment with different types of abstraction and figure making that border on caricature but have a certain kind of depth and vitality that elevate them to a very personal way of seeing form, shape, and identity.