Sunday, April 16, 2017

Tree and Hillside (Oil Bar Painting Revised)


This is a project with a long history, and today, for the second time, I finished it.   In October 2014, I took some photos during a walk at Appleton Farm, in Ipswich, MA. I edited one of the photos to use  as a reference for this painting (posted here Jan. 2 and 3 of 2015). Then I began painting and pronounced the painting finished on Mar. 20 of 2015.  At the time, I said that the painting was finished, "not perfect, just finished".  I hung it up in my studio at home.  Since then, I have often thought about taking the painting up to Porter Mill, but never did, thinking that I wanted to do more with it.  I never did seal the edges. Well, this week I decided it was finally time to deal with this painting.  Over time, I had realized that what I wanted to see was a slightly more impressionistic approach to the foliage. But I wasn't sure, so a couple of days ago, I took a quick photo of the painting, imported it into Procreate on my iPhone, and played around with some brushes to get a little preview of the changes I wanted to make.  That gave me enough courage to get the painting down from the wall this morning and dive in. I used some oil bars in red and yellow and small brushes to paint into the foliage, adding brighter color and making some of the leaves blend together a bit more. The painting was true to the photo in showing the individual leaves, but I wanted to emphasize the tree as a whole. This morning  I didn't look at the original photo, but just went by what I wanted to see on the canvas. I tried to be careful not to do too much.  I also added some more bright leaves to the ground under the tree.  I think the painting is better now, and I may submit it to an upcoming show.  In any case, it is time to do more oil bar landscapes. so it is time to say (for the second time) that this is finally, finally done.  As I said before, not perfect, just finished.

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