Christmas Past

Another Christmas flavoured painting. I’m old enough to remember Christmas without television, lights, tinsel, and all the trappings our children expect in this season. There was Santa Clause of course, but he was an imaginary figure. The only clues about what he looked like were in printed illustrations. The task of producing and delivering presents to the entire population of the world was no problem to this guy. Recently, one of our grandchildren was perplexed as to why Santa was using the chimneys to gain access and deliver the presents. Why not use the door, like everybody else?

Rich brown is the colour of the Irish winter. So the backbone of this painting is Burnt Umber, a chocolate colour with a hint of red. It peeps through the snow and frosted grass and its also in the sky colours. The warm colours of the clouds are Burnt Umber and a lot of white. In the context of sky colour it looks OK, even though its a brown colour. This helps to knit the two parts of the painting, sky and ground, together.

There are 3 colours used, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna and Prussian Blue, loads of white but no black. Liquin was used to produce a smooth sky which I now like, after a period of painting skies as textured colour.

I like the lighter colours I’m getting at the moment. Deciding not to use black was a good decision. Here is a painting from 2 years ago when my colours were heavy and stodgy.

Here is the video of the above painting. Its 16″ x 12″ and took under 2 hours to complete.