This painting, started earlier this week, is one of my "Mountain Daydreams" based on my imagination and on memories of the Colorado mountains. But this painting is unusual because the memory is so specific, the Flatirons near Boulder. I referred to photos to get the basic shapes of the Flatirons, but after that, I worked from my imagination. My goal was to have this painting read as black. (My show in July will be organized around the color wheel.) Yesterday I had tried to make the painting darker, but I was losing things in the process. So this morning, I went back to square one by using an earlier photo of this painting (as it was on May 20) as a reference to restore the patterns of light and shade on the rock outcroppings. That was an immediate improvement. In going darker, I had also lost the contrast of the blue foreground with the slightly darker blue around the rocks, so I used an ultramarine blue/Mars black wash over that area. (With apologies to Professor Robert Daigle, my painting teacher who taught us never to add black to color.) Next, I modified the sky. I liked the pale orange light in the sky that I had at the beginning, but as I had made the painting darker, that area had lost definition. So I reworked the shape of that area, and added a purple wash to the top part of the canvas for contrast and definition. Now I am ready to say that this painting is finished, although I may still make small changes to correct small mistakes.
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