January Pastorale, 17 x 17, Art Spectrum “Supertooth”

I’m calling this post ‘painting without a net” because I did this painting without any photo references. On Friday I drove to western Pennsylvania and back, a trip I take every two months to visit a friend in prison. The weather was lousy so I didn’t bring my camera. But I kept seeing things of interest, like dark cattle on a hill against the blue mountain, and a farm house interestingly placed at the foot of the hills. I saw all of these things in a split second. Yesterday, I decided to make up a composition that would capture some of what I saw and I had a really good time doing it. Aside from the house, the entire composition is really about abstraction: shapes, lines, and color.  I did a basic drawing, but decided to keep myself free to add hills and shrubbery as I felt the composition needed them. I placed a  large tree to the right of the house, then took it out and put in smaller, more wispy trees. I began with Giraults so as not to add thick layers of pastel that would be hard to remove. But I removed very little.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’m used to working from photos, while also wanting to be a little less detailed, a little more abstract. Pure abstraction doesn’t offer enough satisfaction for me, but I DO love to just play with colors and shapes. Doing landscapes without the crutch of a photo allows me to have a certain amount of freedom while still creating a picture someone else can relate to. I very much enjoyed the articles in the most recent Pastel Journal (Feb. 2013) on three landscape painters and their interpretations, from fairly detailed to very, very suggestive. I want to be somewhere in between–I want my paintings to have the integrity of looking believable and being well constructed. In this painting, I got hung up on the dark bushes in the foreground. I like the shapes, the dark blues, and felt the composition needed them. But then I got worried about reality–would they look like they were in summer foliage amid patches of snow? So I tried to make them look like some kind of evergreen. Then decided to not worry about it a lot. People can make of them what they want!