Autumn Fields, as initially painted

Dear Friends–It’s been a hard week!  I join millions of others in feeling devastated and worrying about the future of my country. However, I have decided to try to do good things for people and continue to live my life as an artist to the best of my abilities. So, with that in mind, I thought I’d share this recent painting and its ups and downs with you.

I started working on it several weeks ago. It’s a scene from Montgomery County and its soy bean fields.  I really wanted it to be painterly but I struggled with it. Initially, I was excited about a large yellow barn that was in one of the pictures. But I decided that the barn would fight with the tree for prominence and decided to add the small buildings from other photos.  I liked the fact that the foreground had several different plants in it and the way it was broken up, but I couldn’t get the color right.  So I brought it to a critique session with several of my friends.

They loved the tree on the left and the sky, but definitely not the reddish tree in the middle. Nor did they like the foreground.  One friend kept saying “you have your work cut out for you!”

Close up of sprayed area

I took the painting outside and brushed off the entire bottom and as much of the red tree as I could. Then I washed it with a sponge and sprayed it with workable fixative. One of my challenges was that this is pastelbord and it seemed to have no tooth (what happens when I use hard pastel instead of watercolor for the underpainting). I hoped that the spray would give the foreground some texture that I could play with.   So here is an image of part of the foreground after I added some pastel to it. You can see that the underpainting is coming through rather nicely.

I filled in the sky and background trees where the red tree had been and redid the shed, giving it a lighter roof and nice form. I was really happy with it!  But then I had to attack the middle, whose straight line of trees I’d been unhappy with.  I wanted to give it more interest, so I added bushes in front of the left hand trees, added small leaves and bushes, and worked on making the shapes more interesting.  I simplified the area of fields just below, then worked on the bottom part, adding more greens to the dark area and keeping the bottom simple and closer in value to the soy bean field, but making sure there were some darks and more individual strokes.

Soy Bean Fields, 16″ x 20″, Pastelbord

So here is the finished picture.  There is no evidence of the red tree and I think that the lines of dark work better, as does the foreground. I’m quite happy with this picture now. Not my greatest effort, but certainly something I’m OK with.

I wish you all peace and love and happy painting times and I sincerely hope that our blessed country will survive!