Bruce's Barn in Blue

After being quite disappointed in yesterday's work on the Pienza painting, I decided I needed a break from it.  My folders of photos that could be paintings are stuffed with possibilities, but this morning I had one in particular in mind.  It's a photo that would call for very loose work - lots of water and interesting colors.

Down the road from us is an old farm whose owner is elderly.  When we moved here, he had more land under cultivation and would even sell his own honey at a little stand near the barn. Later on, he became a bus driver for our school district.  After retiring from that, he started to slow down and even sold a big chunk of land. One could see the writing on the wall.

No one lives on the land anymore, but the farm buildings still stand and there is no sign of a new owner - yet.  So, although I have taken a lot of photos over the years, I still take as many as possible before a housing development takes over this farm.

Here's one of those photos which I altered quite a bit. 

As you can see the colors have been turned into their color complement (dull green grass = red-brown), and there isn't a lot of detail - plain buildings, indistinct trees, and cloudy, muted sky.  This is a photo that calls for a lot of washes and a very loose hand. You'll see that I gave the buildings a bit more definition (and the perspective isn't quite right yet), but the trees are loose.  The sky, ground, and even the road were simply done by "painting" the surface with a wet brush and then dipping the brush into paint then touching it to the surface and allowing the color to spread as it will within that damp area.  That's what creates that loose feel.

So far I am pleased with the way this is going, but it is definitely a first draft!

View from Pienza

Today I spent the entire day (well, almost all of it) working on a view from Pienza, a hill town in Tuscany.  Not too long ago I had looked up images from Pienza and discovered that the photo I had taken was an "iconic" view.  For about two minutes I debated about painting from my photo; no one really wants to paint something that is, "Oh, you painted that? Ho-hum."  But since I really like the scene, I decided to paint it even if it has been overdone.

First of all, here are two differently treated photos of the view:

The photo on the left is the view with no enhancements as taken in the early evening from the wall surrounding Pienza. The second photo is slightly cropped, and the color has been enhanced.  As you might expect, I chose to use the second photo for a painting.

Now, it should have been easy even though I always expect to run into some issues.  Below are three of the four or five attempts I have painted so far.

The one on the left is my first attempt; it was a study, and I didn't expect anything more than that from it.  When I paint a study, my hope is that I will discover the problems.  Those could be in the composition (should something be left, out or changed in some other way to improve the composition?), in the drawing (is the perspective correctly indicated? do flowers look like flowers?), in the colors (should I adhere to what I see in the photo?), and other problems that I lump under, "How in heck do I do that???"

The attempt in the middle is the second try.  I liked much of it, but hated the sky, and by painting the mid-range trees, I had made painting the foreground trees difficult if not impossible.

The version on the right is the latest version.  It started out all right, but I tried out a different landscape in the farthest back mountains.  I hadn't liked the second version where those two hills meet smack in the middle of the painting so I added a third.  In the original photo, those hills are barely visible so for the next attempt, I'm going to check the on-line photos by others to see where those mountains really are. The middle distance continues to look like a painting by Grant Wood which isn't a bad thing except I am not he.  But maybe I want to be a little like him . . . .?  I changed the perspective of the fields on the right-hand side thinking I would like it - I should have known better.  It makes my head hurt. And the trees?  Lollipops drawn by a five-year-old.

Blast.  Sigh.  But . . .

Tomorrow is another day and another painting!