Twilight Farm, 16 x 20, resurfaced Pastelbord

Board as it appeared after washing off and two coats of primer

Sometime before Christmas, I got into a clean up mode and washed off or threw out a bunch of unframed paintings. This past weekend I resurfaced 10 of them with a gold-toned batch of Colourfix Liquid Primer.  One of them, in particular, really caught my eye.  It was a 16 x 20 demo on Pastelbord that I did back in 2012 for the Virginia Pastel Society. The photo was taken in the middle of the day and included snow on the ground and that is what I painted. However, when I washed it off and added the gold gel, I fell in love with the design of the houses and the blue greens of the underpainting against the golden gel that was pretty solid in areas that hadn’t been underpainting. What struck me was the relative darkness of it and the design of the buildings, which I loved (of course!)

I decided that this painting would be more of a late afternoon painting, perhaps from the fall, as the tree is bare. I didn’t have a photo to work with–only the board. I did a values study with markers, determining that the light would be hitting the left side of the three buildings, with the fourth at right totally in shadow. Also, when doing the values study, I decided not to finish the bottom and leave some of the gold surface just as it was.

Colorwise, I knew that I wanted to work with blue greens, blue violets, and ocher/earth tones and I pretty much kept to that. Beginning with the sky, I used blue violet and blue green Ludwigs, darker on the right and lighter on the left. At the bottom of the sky on left, I used a Ludwig pale orange.  I used various dark blue greens and some blue violet in the dark bushes (I decided these must be evergreen, as the tree was bare!)

For the house and buildings,  I combined an ocher, a blue green, and a blue violet and laryered them, ending with the violet. I used a pale bright yellow in the sunlit areas, trying to make the house front the main attraction.  For the area around the buildings, I quickly brushed on two shades of green, with light in the front (and on the left side of the bushes). I roughly added bare bushes around the buildings. Then, I rather quickly added the foreground. At first I had a strip at the bottom, smack in the middle, so I extended it to the right, so that the bare patches of gold would not be the same.  And I decided it was done! It took me maybe 3 hours and I loved every minute of it!  I DO love working on this kind of surface. I particularly loved the way the gold showed through in the sky, making it sparkle.

I may even have a buyer for it!!!  But that’s not so important right now as knowing that I was able to rescue a board and make something much better out of it. It gave me a real feeling of satisfaction.  I have to admit that I prefer Pastelbord resurfaced than on it’s own!

As a postscript, I have to tell you a funny story. In Jan. John and I hosted our court neighbors for an open house. A Russian couple, who have lived here 12 years but we had never met, came with their 10 year old son. It turns out that the husband is from an art dealing background and knows a lot about art. AND–it also turns out that some years back a bag of my thrown-out paintings blew out of the garbage can and onto his front yard, and my paintings have been gracing his son’s walls for years without him having any idea who had done them!!!  You just never know!!!