Spring Break

So far this Winter, our weather has been exceptionally mild. Over Christmas we had a high of 15 degrees Celsius. There were days, last June, when the day-time temperature was as low as 15 degrees – it wasn’t a great Summer. Two years ago the temperature on Christmas Day was minus 11 degrees Celsius. As you can guess, Irish weather is enormously variable. This year there is already a little bit of growth but it will fall foul of the variability as there are many months of potentially frosty weather before the arrival of Summer.

This painting hopefully captures the premature arrival of Spring. The chlorophyll is rich and active and shimmering in the Winter light. But it will only take a few days of frosty weather and this will be reduced to the usual browns of January. The colours used in this painting are Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Cerulean Blue and black and white. I’ve made a conscious effort to paint in a rough loose way. This, hopefully, is in keeping with the frantic growth and a nice break from the previous few paintings of static winter. The size is about nine inch square and took just over an hour to paint.

I’m using tiny amounts of Liquin in the later stages of the painting, mostly because this makes the rough strokes of paint easier to apply. Liquin does make the application of paint easier, especially when painting over a wet under layer. Without this medium added there tends to be a little too much blending with the under colours. I used this blending to advantage when painting the snow in recent paintings – the white paint of the snow picked up whatever was underneath. I didn’t want this to happen here so I used Liquin.

I will post the video of the painting process in a few days, see you then.