Exhibited: Sorelle Gallery, Westport, Connecticut Private collection, Bedford, NY My thanks to the collectors of this oil for their new home!
About this oil:
This oil is of an oft-used and imaginary place of mine that is full of detail. I like to look at the wider landscapes that are in abundance and take a small slice of that view, creating an oil like this one that focuses on the many subtleties to make it interesting and believable.
For the focused areas, it’s very important to be mindful of those details… what is occurring at the edges of things, the compositional arrangement and then there is the color.
From the start, I set out to do a cool line of trees with a bright foreground. A number of combinations were tried out but I finally began to settle on blues and yellows, but with a twist. By adding high-contrast darks at the boundary line, the blues and yellows became even brighter. Everything else, the trees, hills and sky would be of a softer tone and focus, all secondary to the brighter blues and yellows.
The blue-aqua hills in the far back fade into the pale sky, complementing, but not distracting the power of the blue forest. The last, big compositional part would be the tall trees. I wanted something to happen that would be really colorful and spirited.
Since I’m the one in charge, I declared those trees would be anything but green, resulting in the many-hued, warmer color arrangement. It took a number of painting sessions to get it right, but I enjoyed all of my time spent in this forest.
