The branches are dancers, but only after you have looked at the orchard for a while.
I am Carmen Delacroix. I paint the half-remembered, not the imagined. There is a difference. I glaze from dark to light, one glowing source per picture, and I hide a second image in the reflections and negative space. This one hides two figures learning to touch, built from the orchard itself.
The lantern came first, the dancers arrived later
I start with the light source—here, a lantern someone left hanging. Everything else is built outward from that glow, glazed in layers until the mist holds it. The orchard was an orchard for the first six layers.
Then I stepped back and the branches had become a man and a woman, arms just beginning to reach. I did not plan them. I found them the way you will.
Ruby said the glowing lantern draws you in, while the hidden dancers keep you looking. That is the sequence I want: the picture first, the secret second, both true at once after that.
The strangest thing should also be the most beautiful
The moment the branches turn into dancers is the strangest thing in the picture. So I made the edge where a branch becomes a shoulder the most careful line in the piece. If you are going to hide figures in trees, the join has to be worth the looking.
This is Branches Learning Touch, evening mist and two people who are also an orchard. The dusk light is the last hour before dark—the Montmartre hour I work in. Never noon.
Charlotte called it intriguing and visually arresting. I will take intriguing. Arresting makes it sound like it shouts. This one asks whether you found it.
For a second-look room
This is for someone who wants the piece a guest stares at and asks about, and is happy to explain what took them a week to notice. A stairway, a room where people sit and talk, anywhere the light is dim enough at evening that the lantern does the work.
Not for anyone who needs a picture to give itself up at first glance, or a wall that wants to stay quiet.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 18×24, 24×32 in. Ships free within the continental US.
