A Small World - an oil painting

As a child, I used to look at marbles, or anything made of glass, and imagine a world inside of it. Or I would see faces and scenes in the wallpaper of the house or in the grain of wooden furniture. This painting is a nostalgic effort to render a lost imaginary childhood world in which I saw magic everywhere.

Leonardo de Vinci had this to say about this type of creative activity:

“Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colors. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose peeling you can find every name and word that you can imagine.

Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar things, which may bring you honor, because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.”

My website: www.kathleenscarboro.fr

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