Autumn Lake

Its good to look at your paintings as a series of steps on a journey. And the best way to do this is to physically stretch them out in a chronological line and look, from one to the next, as if you are retracing your passage through time. From this perspective, patterns will be seen to emerge, some good and some you would like to change. For me it was a tendency towards dark, heavy colours and shapes which I set out to change. This is the third in this series where my objective was to raise the tone of the colours.

The colours used really don’t matter other than resisting the urge to add black to the shadow colours. In this painting the only black used was in the shadows on the trees on the left and on the boat and these were almost an afterthought to strengthen these areas.

Its a three colour painting as usual, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Umber and French Ultramarine Blue, plus white and the tiniest amount of black used unmixed in the shadows as mentioned above. The size is 16″x10″ and was painted in about 2 hours. As usual I didn’t use a medium, only a solvent (White Spirits).

Here is the painting process. See you soon.