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A man spends decades on a single painting, not something huge, not something meant to
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grab you from across the room.
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A canvas about 27 and 3 quarters by 35 inches, around 70.5 by 88.9 centimeters, small enough
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so that you have to step in close, almost within arm's reach, to really see and feel
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what's going on in the surface.
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Albert Pinkham Rider, who was born in 1847 in New Bevver, Massachusetts, by the 1800s,
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he was in New York, and people knew that he worked different.
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Most painters worked fast, finished the piece, sell it, move on, but a rider worked at his
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If something did not feel right, he kept going back to it, days, months, years.
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One of those paintings was the Tempest.
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It pulls from Shakespeare, mainly act one, scene two.
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You've got Prospero Miranda out on a rocky shore, a storm breaking around them.
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In Rider's version, they're small against it, a lantern, a gesture upward, and everything
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else's sky and water coming apart.
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He started the painting in 1892 and kept working it through the 1910s, reworking it heavily
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between 1896 and 1918.
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More than 20 years on the same canvas, he built in layers.
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Oil paint went down first, and then he waited, sometimes weeks, sometimes longer.
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And then back in again, he added varnish, resin, wax.
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The surface got thicker.
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In some areas, the paint rises up in the ridges that you could see from the side.
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And in others, it sank and pulled apart.
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He scraped parts down and repainted them, and at one point he took a hot poker and dragged
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it through the thickest part of the sky to get the texture that he wanted.
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The whole thing kept shifting.
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The paintings started to break while he was still working on it.
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Cracks spread across the surface, some fine-like airlines, others wider, cutting through layers
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that never fully set.
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Most of it darkened more than he likely expected, and that kind of breakdown.
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It shows up across a lot of his work.
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It came from how he built his paintings, wet layers, heavy mixtures, pushing the material
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past what it was meant to do.
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By normal standards, that means something went wrong.
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He kept going anyway.
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He wasn't trying to make something clean.
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He was trying to make something feel right.
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And he was willing to accept the damage if it got him closer to that.
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Today the Tempest hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
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You can see it all, the uneven surface, the raised ridges, the cracked sections that
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catch light differently, depending on where you stand.
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It doesn't look preserved.
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It looks like it's been through something.
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And that's what brings it back to that small canvas that you had to step in close to
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Most things done fast, they look good for a while, smooth, clean, easy.
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The work that stays with you usually takes longer than you planned.
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And it rarely ever comes out perfect.
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You can often see the time put into it if you look close enough.
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Rider, he understood that trade off.
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And he stayed with it until the painting carried that story on its own.
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These are interesting things.
