This is the second postcard-sized picture for the Open Eye Gallery 'Small Scale' show. There's some music associated with painting it, though not as a mood-setter. While working on the last stages I was listening to Radiohead's first album, 'Pablo Honey', and this happens to be the first track. Very refreshing. The whole album – which includes their breakthrough single 'Creep' - is quite raw in comparison to what they went on to produce, but you can hear where they're going.
The original source image was a screenshot grabbed from google streetview. Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea where this landscape is. This is annoying, a) because I wanted to use more information from the surroundings when composing the picture, and b) to source more material with that light and landscape. The screenshot was taken when I was under the mistaken impression that the global coordinates were still being displayed (a practice discontinued some time ago). I now make sure that I have a record of a landscape's location and time, and that I can find it again. This one's got to be European, but whether it's Western Russia, France, Poland, Sweden, or Lithuania, is beyond me.
(My current method of recording a location: Once in streetview, go to the little info box in the top left corner. Click the 'three dots', then click 'Share or embed image'. Either copy that on-screen link or take another screenshot of it).
What I liked about this setting was the saturation and freshness of the colour and light, and the way that while the shorter trees of the group were still, the tall birch was being made ragged by quite a strong and very local gust of wind. This tree also seems to lean into the wind, which is even more interesting. The only compositional tweaking is some cropping of the source image, and some repeated and reversed copy-and-pasting of some of the original foreground grass, to hide some road surface in the bottom right corner.
Colour-wise, I've used a fair bit of Cadmium Lemon in the greens to boost their intensity – a step up for me as my palette is usually fairly muted. In terms of paint handling, there's quite a lot of scratching into the wet paint in the foreground grass, and – except in the clouds - I refrained from mass blurring and softening with fan brushes. Until the last session, that is, where I had to correct some jarring and misjudged final darks in the trees, and blurred the lighter opaque greens over these hard-edged miss-steps. I wish now that I'd softened some of the red-browns of the trunks and branches – transparent glazes over the plain white bark - but there you go.
This little painting probably took too long and may still be too rough, but I did learn something about widening my range of marks. Whether that gets carried forward is another matter, but all-in-all this was a useful piece to have got done. And despite being a little angsty about the trees, I'm actually quite pleased with the softness of the sky. It feels very calm.
Which is nice...
