Vermont Paintings

I have been painting Vermont this week. It’s beautiful here and I really should be outside. But, instead, I’ve been in the studio, trying to remember what our one late afternoon in northern Vermont felt like! I’m doing this in the hopes that Jud Hartmann will want my paintings for his gallery in Grafton. We’ll see! The first one was the painting from the small town of Barnet, Vermont Whites. I’m not sure how well the various colors I used are showing up in the photo. I used a warm but light lemon yellow in the church steeple and house (left side) and various cooler violets in the barn and front of house. We were there around 4:30 and the light was very bright. I’m worried that the painting may appear too cool, however. The composition is pretty true to the photo, but I moved the church steeple and widened the roof of the barn. I also added a hint of more golden rod in the far distance on the right.

The painting from Danville area was done yesterday. For both paintings, I used a yellow green hard pastel in the underpainting. However, in the Vermont Whites, I used soft blue pastels that pretty much covered it up. In the Danville painting, I brushed a very light violet Girault over the yellow, allowing it to show through and I’m really happy with the glow that it produced. In this painting, I converted a house in the background into a Congregational Church. I Like the progression of buildings and the vertical of the steeple. I’ve included the underpainting, which I took with my cell phone. It might be a bit blurry but I wanted to include it. I decided to use a warm under warm/cool under cool approach for this painting. I was afraid that I’d get confused in the grasses and it made it a lot easier. This is one of my favorite types of composition: a high horizon with interesting building shapes and lots of grasses! I also made up the orange tree in the background and added orange leaves to the small bush in foreground (which was there, but not orange) to help balance the color. I wanted the feeling of late summer/early autumn, just as the colors are beginning to turn.