Don't say it!!

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso

Encyclopedia Britannica

Often when people look at my pictures they invariably say, "I can't draw a straight line." Uh, neither can I!! At least not without a ruler. Art is not straight line. While the subject, such as this lighthouse, appears to have straight lines and I might use a ruler to get that established in the initial drawings, the lines are not totally straight when done with the brush. This way it looks more organic rather than industrial. 

After the Storm Oil 11 x 14

The straight line is an illusion. This is true for the ancient building, the Parthenon, built around 440 BC, which makes it about 2,450 years old. Amazing. More amazing is its construction. The columns which appear straight and parallel to each other are actually not. The building is so large that the designers had to take into account the curvature of the earth; if they had made them all perpendicular to the floor, the columns would appear to be pointing slightly outward, like pins in a round pincushion. To compensate the architects made the columns point slightly inward, so they appear straight and parallel. This was just one of the adjustments to the design to create an allusion of rows of straight columns, while there is not one straight line in the whole building. So when you look at a person's art, don't mention straight lines; you might get an eye-roll.

This is an early  painting based on a photograph of Point Wilson my late sister took, rainbow and all. In looking at it now I realize that the light would appear thinner at the top simply because it is further away from the viewer; because it is the same width, it appears chunkier on top. But it's a nice painting anyway; I wish my sister could have seen it.