Les Fourquettes

oil on card 21x15cm

The third of the four small scale pieces. The source landscape is in France, so here is some small scale French piano I listened to while working on it - Erik Satie of course, Gnossiennes No.5. The location is near a cluster of small villages in Normandy which seems be called 'Les Fourquettes'.

This is a fairly straightforward little painting, mostly about the colour and light. It's not my usual Ultramarine/Prussian Blue colour of sky here, it's more of a greyish/lilac-ish mix using Ultramarine/Ultramarine Violet. I've slightly exaggerrated the source's 'violetness' a bit – and I suspect that the automated 'streetview' colour is more an accidental artifact and less the actual sky colour at the time – but I think it works though. My general foliage and grass colour was way too blue just before finishing, so I applied a thin Cadmium Yellow and Raw Sienna glaze (in thinned Stand Oil) touched on lightly over it. That did the trick, and also brought out some of the red-browns. I'm quite pleased with the colour on this painting, and I like the light, fuzzy, final white layer over the nearer clouds – it makes them seem brighter than they perhaps really are

As you'll have gathered, the source image is a Google streetview screenshot, from about ten years ago. When I set it up in photoshop for the required 21x15cm, I realised that the composition needed tweaking. Usually it's fairly straightforward to go back to the original location and see what can be pulled in or shifted across to solve any problems. Unfortunately, the only clues to where the original location was were the previous and following screenshots and the road number – D87. The previous screenshot (taken shortly before) was from the D126, so, having finally found the correct D87 (there's another one in the south-east France) I concentrated on where those two roads are close. After following them, and looking down on several spots that looked promising, I engaged Streetview and saw some trees that looked familiar – the stand on the left. I'd found the place! The weather and season were not the same, but luckily Google stores images from previous streetview runs, and I was able to 'go back in time' for the images I wanted. I shifted the clouds around a bit, and pulled in the trees on the right to get a better balance. So all that palaver was very much worth it, and quite rewarding.

So that's all four of the set finished, photographed, and delivered to the gallery in reasonably good time – at least the first three were – and are now up on the walls for the 'On a Small Scale' exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. I haven't started the write-up of the last one yet, but it should follow on fairly soon, later this month.