New work: Green Canopy, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

Green Canopy

Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in.

Exhibiting: Sorelle Gallery,​ Westport, Connecticut, $13,500 framed

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About this oil:

I have been intrigued by this composition of a line of trees at a creek revealing a dense forest beyond. This is the largest painting I have done that captures that idea.

The oil began as trees with very sparse foliage but that wasn’t very effective for this scale so I shifted to made the trees fuller. The background was in place but now it was reduced by a third.

At that point, I let it rest and worked on other projects. It remained on one of the easels so I could see it everyday. About a week later the good solution presented itself. It was the end of a painting session with another oil and I was about to clean up the palette with a big selection of greens laid out.

Looking over at this large oil in progress, I could see that adding more variations to the greens and blues would create complexity and make the artwork far more interesting.

Often, paintings in progress seem to develop a life of their own, demanding one thing and rejecting another. This one eventually shifted from being a frustrating puzzle into a rewarding conversation. It came together naturally in the end, shaped by leftover colors from another work still in progress.