This is another example of a two-panel field painting converted into a single canvas in the studio. Here are the two panels done mostly outdoors about 2 years ago. I like the left side especially although I wish the houses had been better drawn.
And here is the final product after many revisions.
I worked up this second piece as a gift. I began it as an acrylic on canvas, basically following the original treatment of the scene. As I worked it in further I became more traditional in depicting the scene and tested out the addition of fishermen on the bank and a skiff coming around the bend in the bayou. Neither of these was satisfactory. I had the color palette pretty tightly bound to the original color scheme, which meant deep olive greens and subdued other colors except for a bold sky and reflections in the water. The stage immediately after I eliminated the skiff (0:20) is my favorite in acrylic. The original had fresher brush strokes than the second version at its terminal point in acrylics but the second one had a peaceful depth that I still like.
When I switched over from acrylics to oils, (0:30) I brightened and lightened the colors working from right to left. I was mostly interested in getting the sky and water to be reworked in oil, but once one starts that, it’s necessary to go over the whole thing in oils to make the piece hang together. I enjoyed working with oils for the first time in a very, very long time. The intensity of the paint and the fluidity and richness of how it goes on were things I had forgotten about.
As I moved to the left side, I found myself doing much more fine drawing with brushes which led me to use a yardstick in place of a mahl stick. This became necessary because the underlying oil paints weren’t dry.
I reworked the two houses to better develop their design and details. I also eliminated one of the pavilions at the end of a pier, which opened up more lawn and enabled me to show oak trees in better detail in the middle distance. In the original painting the perspective is drawn to lift the buildings, but in the second piece they are basically in line with the horizon.
After trying several times to add figures back onto the little spit in the middle of the painting, I took them out and then added a pickup truck in front of the house on the left. I made various adjustments to account for relative size and perspective of buildings, trees and people along the way, and then worked a lot on the water, settling for a pretty flat surface in the open bayou and a reflection effect in the little inlet.
Here is a progression of stages of the Bayou Bernard landscape with a transition from acrylic to oil in the last few.