This is an acrylic painting on 61x46cm birch panel. The original is not yet available, however high quality limited edition prints are on my Bluethumb store.
In this post I want to talk about the process I used to create this new painting. Every artist obviously has their own approach, just as they have their own style. If they’ve learned to paint in a formal setting, that can obviously have a big influence on how they go about composing and constructing a work – for me, being totally self taught, I’ve developed a method that seems to work for the way I want to paint, allowing me considerable freedom to decide what I want to do along the way.
So to begin. A white board on which I’ve painted a basic value sketch in grey. I find this a more useful starting point than drawing the scene in pencil, as it gets me using the brush straight away & lets me fill in areas that would otherwise just be lines. I can get a feel for where I want the strongest contrasts of light and dark contrast to be, and the sense of movement and direction I want in the painting.
I’ve just used a couple of blue colours, mixed with grey to tone down their saturation, and then added some impasto white where I wanted highlights. The broad sweeping structure of the clouds is coming out pretty well I think.
Even more colours, some purples, lighter and darker blues , as it continues to take shape. I feel I’ve gone as far as I can with the sky now – it needs colour on the foreground.
Again, just blocking in basic colours. They’re a bit bright and overly saturated, but I intend to tone them down in subsequent layers. I’ve gone back to the sky and added further contrast to the clouds near the horizon, wanting to give the impression of an approaching rain storm, while lessening the darkness on the upper right. I want the viewer’s eyes to be drawn to the storm, rather than wandering around the painting.
The foreground is taking shape now. More subtle details here and there, less brightness, and trees have been added. I wasn’t sure about this, in fact I’m still not. Adding shapes which are recognisably trees has pushed this painting in the direction of being more impressionist-realistic than impressionist-abstract. So be it.
And the finished painting. I feel I achieved the sense of the land being partially sunlight and partly in shadow, and of the rain approaching. The buildings, indeed the whole scene, are inspired by the National Arboretum in Canberra where I live, a popular place for landscape photographers, including me. So I added myself taking a last shot before returning to my car – not sure if that was a bit whimsical, probably it was, and whimsy is something I generally try to avoid. It needed something though, it felt too empty otherwise, and it made it more personal.
Overall would I have liked this composition to be more free, bold and semi-abstract? Perhaps. Whenever I take a break from painting I tend to revert back to painting scenes rather than painting from imagination; a little of that freedom has disappeared and I have to work to get it back. I’m more than happy with how this turned out though, it has a brooding atmosphere to it that just unfolded as the painting developed.
