"Amazon Park"
The canvases discussed in this post were painted yesterday in one marathon session outside in what was a glorious, sunny autumn day.
"Rattlesnake Road"
The countryside in autumn is a special challenge and, at the same time, a delight to be there painting. I chose a variety of locations, vistas really, that provided an element of linear perspective and, well...nature provided the light and the color.
The riot of colors can best be captured, in my opinion, with spots of color set down immediately or as quickly as is possible, assuming, of course, that the linear perspective lines, assumed or explicit, are guidelines that create a great space, an opening as it were, with depth and distance.
"Mt. Baldy"
I prefer to perch high above the scene, like a bird on a mountain branch, to see if I can capture at least the feeling of a great expanse, a distant valley, or the thin slivers of light illuminating the horizon. Sometimes this is a great effort, the nearby tree formations are concealing their true structure, the light changing rapidly, playing hide and seek.
One has to retreat and concentrate on light, always how the light plays over the visual field. Or go back to the darks and state and restate the structure that might not be as strong, in reality, to make this a good picture. The need to exaggerate and punch the darks harder or the need to scrape them away several times until one discovers their true identity.
"Amazon Park"
Sometimes if I concentrate on the larger shapes and their shadows, I get more productive faster. I force myself to begin with a large area of color, the horizen all the way to the bottom of the canvas, and then to try to find, within that dark, the largest shapes, differentiated only by a dab here and there for their cast shadows.
"Amazon Park"
Another consideration is structure that encompasses the entire scene. Take an enormous park view with winding paths and distant hills. Here the structure is very complex and breaks down into many separate zones of color and shape.
"Amazon Park"
Remember that the sky is the primary illumination of a landscape setting its mood and tempo. The sky brightness and its shapes also sets up a beat or synchopation of shapes, a vibration if you will, that carries through the scene.
The colors must remain luminous and expressive despite the overall concern with structure and accuracy. Here the bright sunlight and blue sky give an upbeat appearance and an attempt is made to capture the light of a "glorious day" in the autumn. Poetry takes over from fact and becomes fact, becomes the feeling and the situation, the scene understood in this manner is not something that can be captured in a camera, but only through the lens of the artistic temperment transferred to arm and hand and brush. Even the photograph would still have to be translated again, through paint and interpreted via paint, at least this my way of seeing things.
The painter, setting all of this down as quickly and as spontaneous as possible, is the witness and recorder of natural beauty and in capturing it as it surrounds and encapsulates the viewer, is both at the same time an impossible and a necessary task that can be accomplished by working directly from nature.
"Amazon Park"
