Rabbitform after Kawase Hasui

So I spent most of yesterday ogling the work of the master artist Kawase Hasui, who was declared a national treasure for reasons that are really freakin’ obvious if you look at his work.

(Seriously, go google him. I’ll wait.)

He did beautiful portraits of an urbanizing Japan. I am in awe. Each one looks like the background for a Miyazaki movie.

Awe in me tends to lead to homage, and I have nothing more suited to put into such a piece than the odd little spirits that occasionally show up in my work. I still don’t quite know where they belong.

This is a view the field in front of the house, which is currently overrun with Queen Anne’s Lace, and the spirit is a little more akin to the Chatham Rabbit, which was once famous, than to the desert jackrabbits I usually paint. My local spirits are small and I do not always know what they want, but sometimes I feel them there nonetheless.

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I do not usually use gradients with quite such reckless abandon, but if you’re trying to mimic printmaking, it’s the only way. And also this took 37 layers and was nearly half a gig at one point, as I layered and layered and layered and the computer just…handled it. Technology is amazing. If I’d tried that on one of my old machines, I could have gone and made a sandwich in the time it took to turn a layer on and off, and if I’d tried to move a layer around, I could have grown the wheat for the sandwich from scratch.