by Stuart Hobbs
Sunlight shines on the snow and the light dances and sparkles white and blue and many more colors. And we are moved by what we see. As an abstract painter, I dispense with the middleman and go straight to the colors. In this case I created a piece with various shades and layers of dark blue on one side and yellow on the other half of the paper. The result was a large field of too much bright color. So I painted over half of the yellow in richer, darker blues, resulting in the picture you see.
I have been painting off and on for a number of years. It was in Advent of last year that I most recently picked up the brush again. At that time, I tried several times to depict the Annunciation using the traditional colors associated with the central characters—blue for the Blessed Virgin Mary and yellow and golden hues for the Announcing Angel. But none of those attempts worked. Now, almost a year later, I looked and saw that without trying to, I had painted the drama of revelation and of light shining in darkness. What had eluded my conscious efforts had come to me through mistakes and reworking while I was looking the other way. Somehow that seems appropriate for an image celebrating the Annunciation and Advent, and all that is to come.
