I found this setting near a village called Åsted, in Northern Denmark. The google streetview source is from a road named Ravnsholtvej - Raven's Wood Road (if the Old Danish meaning of 'Holt' is applied).
'Åsted' (the 'Å' is pronounced like the 'oa' in 'toast - so 'Oasted') means 'a place where something real or imaginary happened' and the word applies directly to 'crime scene'. So this setting could easily be imagined to have had quite dark origins, and most of us have seen enough Scandi Noir to know what that means.
Compositionally, I was very struck by the 'surge' of the ground forms, with the trees erupting from the cleft. Mirrored right to left the rising ground seemed like a wave about to break, but it's more settled this way round, and more about the wind. I've lowered the rise to the right and 'disappeared' the houses on the left, and entirely invented the dark grey sky. The green of the grass was striking too, and the dull sky and foliage hopefully makes it more luminous.
This piece was started fairly briskly. The elements were placed in thinnish dull green oil paint using a white paint dot grid, on Michael Harding's grey acrylic primer (very dense - you only need a couple of coats, and other colours are available). Once the main forms were placed accurately enough, the gouache dots were easily washed off with water, and the painting developed as usual. I wanted to intensify the colour, especially in the grass, so I used a strong Stand oil and Damar varnish medium (plus driers of course), which was much less diluted with Turpentine than normal. There wasn't too much softening and blurring either, except in the sky. The marks are mostly a lot more solid and thicker than usual, but I'm not sure that I'll stick with such a strong mixture in the future. Or if I do use it again, it'll be with less driers; that should make the paint a bit less instantly stiff and more easily 'blurrable'. The final glazes over the trees, and the ironing out of their final darks, were in a much weaker and lighter Stand/Damar mix and softened accordingly. Lesson learnt.
Early on, at the photoshop compositional stage, a far-away memory from boarding school came to mind. I remember being maybe about ten, and at a melancholy late summer Sunday teatime. It would have been not long into the term, weekend free-time over, and with the prospect of a full week of lessons to come. The dining room windows faced eastwards, and while the sky was the dark, solid, grey of the picture above, the trees outside were brightly lit against it by the low sun to the west. A weather front must have passed as I was looking out, as the trees – dark, late summer sycamores - were suddenly caught up by the wind, the undersides of their leaves pale and shimmering against the grey sky. It was stunning.
Getting back to this little painting about some trees in Denmark, that memory certainly gave me the dark sky, and hopefully I've transferred a sense of that rush of the wind.
It would be nice to report that this piece painted itself. It didn't (be nice if one did for a change!), but apart from a struggle to untangle the forms in the middle of the wood it went fairly well. I find it quite potent and sinister, and the nominally implied presence of past ravens and murder is Nordic enough, I think, to not include actual evidence.
