Reflections (Oil Bar Painting as of August 14, 2013)

Reflections (Oil Bar Painting as of August 14, 2013), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

Here is my oil bar painting, still a work-in-progress, as it looked on Wednesday, August 14. This landscape is roughly based on a photo that I took at Bradley Palmer State Park, in Topsfield MA. (My reference photo is posted here on June 14, 2013.) On Wednesday, I was feeling like this painting was getting pretty close to finished, and I decided to concentrate on tops of the trees across the water, the top one or two inches of the canvas. It was while I was painting those tree tops that I realized that one of the four main tree trunks didn't go anywhere! It was a tree-trunk without branches. (If you are amazed that I could have missed that, let me just say that I once painted a portrait for three hours in a painting class without realizing that I had painted in six fingers instead of five.) So the rest of my painting time on Wednesday was spent in creating a tree-top for that tree. It seems like a barely noticeable difference, but if something doesn't make sense in the painting, it creates uneasiness even if the reason isn't clear.