Big Sky No. 2, parts 1+ 2

 By Jocelyn Tatum 

I have an affinity for all things that cause me to look up — mostly trees and clouds. When I walk the dogs or go for a long run, I often trip over something because I am admiring tree limbs reaching toward the ever-changing clouds, or the way sunlight plays with both. 

 

Komorebi is a Japanese word that doesn't have an English translation, which means the way light travels through the leaves of trees. I wonder if there is a word for the way light shines through the clouds.

Fall Gallery Night 2019, I stumbled upon a magnanimous canvas of clouds with the sun piercing through. It knocked me back. I took a picture just to admire it from home but walked away knowing I would never allow myself to get it.

A year later, it occurred to me that I still think about that art. The strange state of things and lots of extra time at home has encouraged me to do things I never thought possible. And I don't understand the correlation between the pandemic and my newfound impulsiveness, but it’s there.

The joke I have made lately is — who needs retirement or savings when the world is ending? My proclivity to laugh at the dark stuff helps in times like these.

So I started my quest for this work of art. I contacted the FWCAC and found out who the artist was — Marshall K. Harris, a man known for his beautiful drawings. The title was “Big Sky #1.”

Once I found Marshall’s contact info on his website, I reached out. He informed me it was on hold for an art collector in Houston. A seeming impasse.

A solution. He suggested I commission my own clouds. My own clouds? In my living room? I liked the sound of that. “Big Sky #2, Parts 1 & 2” was born four months later and is an original work.

“Your work is a unique work similar in process and method, but your work was created especially for you and only you. No one will own one like it,” Harris later wrote in an email when I asked him to fact check this.

Marshall drew the negative of a photograph that he took, which spoke to me. He used pencil on Mylar paper, which is a thick non-fiber synthetic and transparent drawing medium. This took him roughly 120 hours.

 

He then scans this drawing into a computer, reverses it, colors it using Photoshop, and applies a screen-printing process to a large canvas. The original drawing hangs with the canvas in the final product.

 

Drawing the reverse of an object allows Marshall to not project his ideas of what the it should look like. It helps him focus on lines and shapes, not clouds in this case, which then permits details to show that would otherwise be missed because of blind spots the human mind can have when perceiving the world around them.

 

I get to look up every time I walk into my living room, and it inspires me to think of new ways to see the world around me.

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