You might see a moon like this only once in … a blue moon! When a title for some art piece just arrives to me and I like it, it sticks!
In this case, what I began with reminded me of the way a full moon often looks in a dark sky, when you see the clouds around the moon lit up. The moon on that night, the real moon, had a shadow somewhat resembling the Ying-Yang sign, which happens to be a favorite symbol of mine.
The symbol was familiar to me many years before I knew what it meant, because, when I was a young child, my Dad subscribed to a magazine with that symbol, in red and white, on the cover. Many elements of early Taoism still appeal to me. So I decided to put one in my picture!
Art Method follows, for those who are interested:
This was made by my favorite method: chance, natural processes, liking a pattern, plus foto-fiddling.
This is a “black plate” piece. My “black” plate is a Japanese-style small square plate (made in China) and glazed with a dark–grey, pewter-like , “metallic” glaze. When certain liquids left on it dry, they form dried puddles in various shapes, different each time. On a photo of the plate, I draw out the colours which I want, and add or change other details as I wish to.
What do I mean by drawing out the colours? As painters know, grey is not always a mixture of black and white but may be made by mixing complementary colours. The beautiful thing is that colours reside almost everywhere, even tho’ you may not notice them! If you take a photo of a dark scene, and later try to increase the saturation of the darkest areas, you may find, not black, but coloured pixels. You may be able to look at the corners of a darkening room and see that the grey is not black-white, but a scintillating “grey” made of the colours which you see in the daylight.
Here is the black plate original. I up-saturated the colours, found shapes which I wished to emphasize, and drew a ying-yang symbol in the centre.
You might be able to “see” certain animals around the moon, if you try really hard! 🙂
