Almost Home

The challenge was that this was my first attempt to work without photos. I drew the image and experimented with color studies. Since I was teaching art at Rosslyn Academy, I thought I really should know how to do this. It took a lot longer and I'm not sure the final effect is that much different than when I paint from photos. At first the maize field was too perfect. Someone said it looked more like field in the States, perfect like a machine had made it. The fields in Kenya are usually hand planted so they are more random. Another challenge was getting the colors of the Eucalyptus trees right. They are quite blue like this in the sunset. Not so bright in nature, but I wanted to emulate the bright colors that Kenyan artists like to use. Of course the people were hard to draw from memory. As I was drawing the picture on location in back of the school I saw women walking up from the river bed. Sometimes they had a child on their backs like this. I added the child running on ahead. The misty place in back of the maize field is a cooking fire burning in welcome at the end of the day. This is a very common scene in Kenya.

Then, Ben, a boy at school died of a severe asthma attack. It was a very sad time. Death in the Rosslyn community happens at least once a year and usually from traffic accidents, but this boy had died in his father's arms because he couldn't get to the children's hospital soon enough. The boy attended Rosslyn since kindergarten and was very popular, so his parents asked to bury him on campus. They chose this very spot! I noticed that the boy in the painting was running ahead of his mother toward home and it seemed like Ben had done that and was now home in Heaven. Sometime later, the parents were reassigned to another mission field and came to campus to say goodbye to their son's grave. As they walked back toward the parking lot I met them. I told them that I thought the painting belonged to them. They wept and left with it.