Pear in the City painting keeps me inspired

Pear in the City, 8″ x 10″, acrylic, Karen Gillis Taylor

Once I decided to make several paintings all in different “styles,” and the theme was The Pear. I like to learn from projects like this. One of my favorites looked like a Matisse painting. One suggested realism in a classical sense. There were others. Then I painted this one, “Pear in the City.” This pear painting was more from my own viewpoint, and so it was good for me to make this final one to remind myself I should paint from my own perspective, in the end. A building in the shape of a pear might be called “surrealism,” but in America people have constructed buildings in the shapes of  hot dogs, so it’s not an idea at the top of a ground breaking art movement. The pear is just a beautiful shape, to make an exciting painting for me!

Since that day, I have painted many imagined cities. I keep this one close to me, because it continues to inspire as I look in the small sections and places within it, bright windows, darker corners, sky over all with a few stars to remind me that cities are man-made, but the creation of the night skies are made by God. Big scale, small scale.

Cezanne did not like art from imagination, I am told. Yet his paintings were far from realism. I enjoy the paintings of Paul Klee and Chagall, who seemed to let their creative spirit come before what nature teaches us to see with our “normal” way of viewing life.

People are drawn to a painting for different reasons. I know when I see an image and something “clicks”. Often it represents an image that I have seen in my “mind’s eye”, or I might simply become excited about the color or the feeling I have seen this image somehow before, in a different part of my life.

Have you ever seen a painting and realized it caught you by surprise? Did you have a reason to think that painting captured your heart or soul? 

If that happened to you, I hope you’ll comment and share.

Thanks for reading,

Karen

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Tags: abstract landscape, abstract painting, chagall, cityscapes, cityscapes by Karen Gillis Taylor, interesting architecture, night paintings, Paul Klee, Surrealism