Crossing

The landscape is busy at the moment, lots of agricultural activity. I like the areas where it is not possible to have successful ‘commercial’ farms. There’s a wildness and charm about these unkempt places. We’ve had an exceptionally dry few weeks and where a once brisk little river served as a boundary, is no longer the case, for curious and mischievous  cattle.

This painting is small, a little bigger than some of my recent work, but nevertheless its small (16″x10″). At this size, painting details, like the cattle in the above painting, is a problem. Its not so much to do with size as with producing detail in keeping with the style of the rest of the painting. As you can see, the style is a collection of daubs and blobs, which when viewed from a moderate distance, take on the appearance of a landscape. Meticulously painted cows would not fit in with this scheme.

Its a trial and error form of painting, placing blobs of colour to give the illusion of cattle. Squinting the eyes and adding a bit, and removing another until it snaps into place is how it works for me. There must be a visual clue to this jumble of paint in order to point the viewer in the right direction as to what is happening. Here it is a single cow shape silhouetted against the reflected light which programs us to interpret the paint blobs as the rest of the herd.

Colours used are Cadmium Yellow, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cerulean Blue plus black and white. There is no medium used, only White Spirits.

Here’s the video of the painting process, see you soon.