Exhibiting: Saks Galleries, Cherry Creek, CO
Framed $4400
 
About this oil:
Paintings can surprise you. They can sit in the studio with the other canvases and like a shy kid, they don’t draw attention to themselves. 
 
That was the case with this oil, begun a couple of months ago in greens and blues. It wasn’t capturing my attention and I continued to select and work on other canvases that showed more promise. 
 
Compositionally, the reticent oil was exactly what I wanted so I pulled it out of the stack and put it up on the easel to consider. Earlier I had worked on a canvas with a lot of yellows and looking at all of those golden remnants on the palette, I got the idea to push this oil in a completely new direction. 
 
Ignoring the greens in place, I began paint over the existing forms and outline new tree shapes in red. I did like how they worked with the greens, so moving forward, I added a bit of the yellows already on the palette. What happened surprised me. The yellows combined with the reds to create something far more striking and the more I covered up the greens, the better it looked. And as a bonus, the thicker the yellow gold paint went on the more powerful the painting looked. The previous version already had a nice sky so it was left as is. 
 
After letting everything dry, I went back and painted in the soft, glowing field and the sky received an array of glowing veils of color as well, putting it all over the top.
 
The formerly shy oil is now full of confidence with stories to tell.