A Piece of Advice

This week’s Discover Challenge from WordPress “brings out the positive: tell us about a piece of advice you’ve received — and would like to share with others.”

The Right Road  14.7.16

When I was a young boy my beloved grandfather said to me:

” In life Andrew there are always two roads, the right road and the wrong road.
Make sure you always choose the right one.”

His advice has stayed with me all of my life and echoed in my mind over the years whenever an important decision has needed to be made or a life-changing direction to be followed.  It has been the best advice a young boy could have ever have hoped.

To complement this week’s Discover Challenge, and particularly as this month I am working through Tony Smibert’s Painting Landscapes from your Imagination,  and also painting as part of Worldwatercolormonth, I thought I would continue the exercises of Chapter 8 in the book with imagined images that reflect the spirit of my grandfather’s advice to me.

Tony suggests making small loose drawings and washes as notes, and not to worry about the consequences.  Some are very abstract but some became quite specific and more detailed as they developed, as you can see.  Each was intended to convey the sense of a fork in the road with a choice of direction between the light and the dark.

This last image is perhaps the darkest of all and reflects what might have been.

Dedicated to the memory of my wonderful grandpa from his grandson,
now a besotted grandpa himself.