Wednesday, April 20, 2011

What's Coming

I'm sitting here watching the rain.  Cold and damp.  Temperature is rising.  Hard to paint in here when I'm thinking about what is and what is coming.  Temperature does it.

A Hint of It

Maybe a hint, but this is a bright mud and stick season image.  Early April.  Even now the part of my palette that has been getting limited work all winter is garnering more attention.  The Ultramarine Blue is searching for yellow ochre, cad yellow light, cad orange, cad red light.  The combinations are looking for mineral violet, alizarin crimson, even some white.  Ditto for Viridian who also is seeking transparent red oxide.  Cobalt muscles in too.  They seem to know it is coming.

USG Prestages This

Ugly Slime Green comes early and doesn't last long.  Its near cousin gives us this.  Then we get.....

Monochromatic in Green

But even here we can see colour starting to creep in.  Your challenge is to make it a painting.  Many painters I know stop painting in the summer.  They just can't take it.  Even Tom Thomson didn't paint summer scenes.  If you are addicted though, you develop strategies for dealing with these things.  Some of these include;

  • do a cropping of a coloured object from the landscape
  • work in the studio
  • work from your imagination
  • take a trip and paint the non green landscape
  • paint water motifs in rivers, lakes, and oceans
  • paint town or cityscapes


The key of course is to keep painting to put on the miles - always with a concept or course - it keeps the development happening.

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