Underpainting for Marshscape

Marshscape, 9 x 12, UART 400 grit

Next week I’ll be in Mattapoisett, MA giving a workshop to a wonderful group of people I’ve been with since 2009. One of our topics is loosening up to incorporate more abstraction in our paintings. While I will never be a purely abstract artist, l like to begin my paintings with strong abstract shapes. It was the shapes of the water, foreground grasses and sand bank that drew me to this image from Mattapoisett.  I’m going to do a demo from it next week and decided to do something today in advance. I worked from a black and white photograph so as to be completely free to chose my colors (one of the ways I like to loosen up). I decided to play with two things I seem to have a hard time with: 1) using more of a blue green palette and 2) using a tonalist value scheme.  I began with a hard pastel underpainting in various reds. In laying on the initial colors, I tried to let some of the underpainting show through. Over time, I cancelled most of it out, but there are still bits and pieces poking through. I used a mid light blue green for the sky, later adding a little blue violet to relate to  the violet in the water. A hallmark of some tonalist landscapes is a darker sky that is not in strong contrast with the land. I couldn’t resist using some strong darks in the foreground grasses and placed other small pieces of dark to lead the eye back into the channel. To offset the pinky oranges in the foreground, I layed some soft pink over the distant grasses.  The only strong lights and darks are in the foreground, with the background primarily differentiated by subtle temperature shifts. I used nothing but soft pastels in the painting in order to keep it as painterly as possible. I find that the UART 400 is great for these types of applications.