improvement?

Four Trees kept bothering me. The trees were realistic in color, the field was an abstraction, the painting was confused. I decided that the idea I started with was to go with color and shape; I wasn't interested in going back to depicting grass in the same manner as the trees. So, I worked a lighter color onto the trees to try to unify the painting. I lost the illusory effect (small as it was) of the leaves and now have something that is an idea of four trees in a field with the color changed to match what I want in my mind, not what I saw that day in the pasture.

I'm feeling my way here, with words on this blog and with paint on my palette. Landscapes that I see in the world are my starting point. The parts I keep in the composition and the colors I mix are an unconscious beginning of where I'm headed.

still tweaking

This is our front field. The painting is large, for me, 24 x 36 inches, and I wanted to straddle the line between realism - yes, you know these are trees and grass and shadows - and abstraction, playing with patches of color, letting the viewer stay with it as a painting on canvas. It's about the paint and texture and color interplay, more than an image of the fields and trees. Where should I make a stand? Hyper-realism is amazing when it's done well, but with photos as an option, I don't want to go there. I suppose Diebenkorn and Kahn and Avery are my influences - they start with real world places and images and then have fun with the paint and geometry of the rectangle plain.

When I start musing along these paths, I come up against the question of why paint in the first place. My kids do amazing things with computer programs and video. If I were thirty years younger I wouldn't paint, I don't think - I'd be doing what they're doing. Ah well.

This painting isn't finished. I want to work on the mid-field, the light area. It's too horizontal right now; it needs some vertical strokes, and maybe some striation of color to break it up visually. Maybe the design process is still valid, even though oil paints are so previous millenium.