Against The Sky

16x20

acrylic on canvas

I really enjoyed painting this piece this summer when I was at Emma Lake. It came from an idea I have been attempting for several years and every time I have tried it, it has never worked out the way I was seeing it in my head. This painting is the closest I have come and so I felt pretty excited about it. I wanted it to have a feel of nearness to the trees and looking up at them. I also wanted to capture how the trees can sometimes look like silhouettes against the sky. The underpainting/ ground is a layer of Raw Umber followed by a layer of Anthraquinone Blue. I then used the "sky blue" colour to cut in all of the negative spaces and therefore reveal the trees, adding more colour along the way. This is the painting that took some heat in the critique that I mentioned in my August 31 post. I'm over the upset of that... it hurt at the time, but in the end I think it turned out to be a cool representation of what I had in my head, it felt good painting it and it was exciting seeing it unfold before me... especially because it was such an experiment. I was using a photo I had taken the first day as a resource, so after painting en plein air all day I would stay late at night and work on this in the studio by looking at the photo on my little digital camera screen (thinking the entire time that a laptop would sure be nice). Anyway, hope you like it... the curator did, so it will be in my show! Yay! And for the last week or so I have been working at the studio on a larger canvas based on this idea... so stay tuned, I'll be posting it soonish.