4-Eyes View the World

Vermont Ain't Flat  Acrylic on Masonite

copyright Robin R Kent

I just got new glasses. With all the bells and whistles. These lenses do everything but wash the dishes. First, they are the new and improved prescription which had been longed for for too long. (Newly retired ones were circa 2007.) Have you noticed when you get new glasses, your eyes are not in sync? Gives me a 'fresh eye' when objects look like they're in a 3D movie. Everything slopes downhill. The ground sure ain't flat. They also change color with the sun and the lens line disappears between the distance and reading part.  I'll look like a movie star and a lot younger in these babies. Especially when I take them off to check. Yep, still dewy complexion with no age lines...
But I've always loved my earliest memories of not seeing well. Such sweet fuzzy views of the world. I finally got glasses around the third grade and what I saw wasn't pretty. I was forced to face reality. These were not your rose colored glasses.
Gone were the soft-focused pastel colors of sky and clouds, of tree leaves and grass. For the first time, I saw the grass and all its blades.  I could almost see each santoku edge and imagine my father sharpening them one at a time during Sunday's predinner ritual. All nature had turned against itself - diamond reflections on the water that cut, and again too bright; light and dark colors competing against each other. No more blending into one. Why can't we all get along? It hurt to look.
That experience has made my contemporary painting style what it is. When I'm creating in my contemporary folk art world, the favored element is volume. Guess it has to be when I do sculpture. OK - in painting, I like mass the best. And blending. Milton Avery paints how I choose to see. Big blocks of mass with soft edges. Nothing persnickety. No minutia. Well, can't resist some dots or graphic additions at the end...but I never was an edgy person.