This is an area that we enjoy visiting for beach combing and kayaking. The locations where these two scenes are set look toward St. Andrews Bay, which is a smaller part of Bon Secour Bay. I shared some details about one of these paintings in the Quarantine Quartet post. As we chafed against the continued lockdown, we would slip away for a day for some remote time on the beach or on an isolated shore in this area.
I had done one of my 2 panel studies at the kayak put-in awhile back. I really liked it a lot. It had an interesting vivid color scheme and hints of the twisting brushwork both of which recall Walter Anderson or even Van Gogh. I wanted to put this scene on a single large canvas. The interesting thing about this study was that I didn’t have time at the site to apply any color so it was a pencil sketch only. Here is what that looked like. it was late afternoon just before we had to get back on the ferry to go home. It was the last canvas available from a getaway weekend we took. The light was vivid and the clouds were long smooth streaks with bunched up clusters beneath.
Here again with the greens in the foreground I am working with zinc white and zinc yellow. I liked the arcs of orange and pale yellow in the foreground. I was too heavy handed with the deeper orange on the far right. It all got started with orange as a result of trying to get the right color of the row of grasses on the right foreground and then I just splashed some orange around elsewhere. I like the shapes in the sand that appear here and wish I had held onto these a little better. Another feature of this version I like is the large amount of white showing through the foreground shrubbery. It was not so in real life. Overall, except for the heavy orange, I like how these colors work together. I wonder sometimes if I should just stop and step away after an hour and declare parts off limits. I also like the spiky bushes in these lighter yellow and blue hues.
As I moved ahead with this I lost some of these nice effects but ended up with a piece that I still like a lot. There is a stronger painting of the palm bushes and the fingers of marsh grass as well as the sky. I also dialed back on the intense orange (my high school team color, one I did not especially like). I did like the very pale cerulean water that seemed to pop nicely against that grey green marsh grass underlined by ultramarine blue. What is missing is a level of detail on the left hand side that takes you somewhere. Here is the next stage of things.
Soon afterwards, I went over to see my brother in Pensacola and a launch of the America’s Cup contender from the New York Yacht Club. It was a glimpse of futurism, like a recovered craft from a crash site. Seeing it take off across Pensacola Bay was a wonderful sight. About 10 days later I returned to this piece over a weekend and zeroed in hard on the spiky bushes. I got a couple of good parts done with interesting combinations of yellow ochre, lemon yellow, and a variety of greens, blues, and browns. I also worked more on the clouds and water.
In some further work I brought it to the point I now have. I have to say I really like this piece despite the good things that were left behind to get there.
Months later, this piece was in line for my plan to convert two piece works into larger one piece ones. The initial efforts tended to track the study pretty closely. Again the cartoonish start showed through.
Almost immediately I doubted my plan to follow the original approach and reverted to the colors at the scene, which were brown and gray and put in overdark shadows. Wrong on color and wrong on tone. I changed tack and went over most of that with white to re-establish the approach in the study. This is an example of the kind of mis-step that I made over and over early in my painting life when not painting from life. I had a French art prof who scolded me with a line something like, “Si l’on peint un paysage, on doit le faire devant la scène.”
Partially erasing what is below is a thing I toyed with at length with an iPad app called Paper. These tend to be a lot of fun as doodles.
I appreciate more than before serious painters like Rauschenberg and Johns and others who worked with complex layerings. What they did was extraordinarily bold, liberating, and bracing. Not for his lack of trying did my art teacher at Millsaps fail to tune me into the power of these artists’ work.
Back from this digression - I continued to work towards a faithful recreation of the sketch and got pretty close. Here are a couple of stages, starting with the most faithful one.
OK, so I got there but somehow I wasn’t happy. Those clouds for example and other things that annoyed me. So I tried to de-emphasize the clouds and work more on the foreground. I did a little more of the crosshatched brush strokes and it was ok but again, I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It felt artificial.
So when the opportunity came, I decided to take it with me on a trip back to the site where the scene was done, as the French art professor had instructed me to do.
I ended up reworking it pretty significantly, taking it back to nature. Much more impasto, much deeper colors overall, and some key changes, including the foreground, the tree, and the orange grasses, now covered in a lime green. Here is what I brought back to the studio.
I liked this foreground a lot more and also felt like the sandy path was better. I could have stayed with that. But, I had to tinker more. Here is where I finally ended up, I wanted to make that tree better and I needed to choose a better outcome for that row of bushes on the right. I maybe went a little too dark in the foreground and lost some interesting features in the process, but this is where my impulses led me.
