Driftboat, Revisited

After leaving this piece in a corner for a few months and glancing at it every so often, I figured it was time to hop back in and scuff it up a bit. There's a nebulous relationship between appropriate detail, foundational form, the interplay of hard and soft edges and a myriad of other variables that each contribute to whether a piece feels “real.”

I find myself actively engaging in conflict with my programmed response – that is, when confronting a piece that feels lacking in reality, my default response has always been to hit it with more detail. Rarely (or never, perhaps) does detail-for-detail's-sake save a piece. And often the complete opposite is true: if I shore up the basic forms, omit detail and let the mind of the viewer fill in some of the gaps, somehow the scene can turn a subtle corner and come to life in a way that no more whiskers or blades of grass could ever accomplish.