Near the end of a month-long stretch of work travel I was invited out to a cabin on the Shenandoah River near Bentonville outside of Front Royal, VA. The weather forecast was unfriendly with only a short window of decent weather. I had acrylics in the pochade box and two 12x18” panels in my hanging bag. I settled on this site because it had a bend in the river and some whitewater. The land-side elements were pretty static and the foreground trees blocked the far side of the river bank, so I wasn’t expecting a lot from the composition. But the river movement and reflections were interesting. And, for the first session, the weather was really nice.
I reduced the cluster of trees in the middle foreground from 7 to 5. This occurred because I omitted space in between the two panels. I started the left one with a green made of yellow and Payne’s gray and a lavender of lightened ultramarine blue and produced an underpainting that reminded me of a Bonnard or early Matisse. In the right panel, I used a green made of thalo blue and yellow and I had one tree drawn right at the left edge, on the seam between the two panels.
In the next phase, I kept the simplified shapes but brought the colors more in line with what I saw. I liked the overall look, especially the values in the water reflections in the left panel and the irregular reflection of the treeline in the right panel. Losing the wild colors made me want to do an alternative version of this painting with a limited yellow and violet palette. I did like the richness of the greens on the far bank.
The second sitting was overcast and threatened to rain. It was time to give shape to individual trees on the riverbank and details to the whitewater. I experimented a little with the colors for the whitewater and liked the results - offwhites, blues, and greens. To make the foreground riverbank stand out from the water, I used a bright green. After putting that in place, I loaded a drawing brush with lots of yellow and blocked in the clusters of leaves on the foreground trees. (I also added graphic elements with a Sharpie.) I liked some of the looseness of the foliage but as a whole it didn’t set off from the background, so this was a problem to fix. Also, it made the color scheme hard to take.
I got a little time to work on this after work during the following week. I cut in with darkened blue black and other greens to shrink and give shape to the foliage. I also used the Sharpie to add branches and edges to the leaf clusters. I added graphic detail to the banks of trees in the middle and far distance. And I did additional work on the river surface reflections and the cluster of bushes on the far right.
To transfer it to oils, I sketched out the field study onto a 12x36” canvas. I worked to keep the colors light and flat. Just as with the study, the hard part would be the foliage and so I held off putting it in until the last.
What I didn’t realize is that the river reflections would be as hard or harder than the foliage. I started out in a very flat and crude way.Someday I’d like to try another version of this all in sets of straight lines like that sketch I did back in Oxford years ago.
To move forward, I used reference photos and the painting, picking elements from each and dropping out things along the way. I liked having clean colors, not covering over too much for errors in mixing or drawing. After awhile, I needed to draw lines on the canvas, but the oils were too wet for a Sharpie. I turned to a small long thin brush and loaded it with Payne’s gray, and after several tries, got to a point where I could do a longer more flowing line.
There’s a point where the color is mixed right and the paint is the right consistency on the brush where you feel free to step in and do new things, depart from nature, the plan, or whatever is your reference point. I felt secure enough to try something out on a nearly-done piece this time when it came to the water reflections, and I decided to cut into the tree reflections with the lavender blue. (Maybe this doesn’t seem like such a big deal - it’s not, really. Except that in this case I am reproducing a painting that had reached an equilibrium without this element.) This changed the painting’s basic focus to the flow of the river, which is what originally attracted me to the scene. So, the oil painting done back in my studio finally got me where I wanted to be despite being far removed from the original scene. This seems like progress.
