Letting It Evolve

Evening Descending, 12 x 16inches, oil on linen

To let a series evolve, and evolve slowly, I avoid making drastic changes from piece to piece. That would be mutation. Or revolution. I try to think of each subsequent piece as a variation of the previous. Keeping the changes small means I can compare the two and make judgements on only the things I changed. If I change too much, I'm comparing apples and oranges essentially, and that doesn't help me much.

For this painting, besides moving the road to the side and rearranging trees, I wanted to try two things. 1) a slightly larger format. This one is 12 x 16. I want to eventually get to much bigger canvases, but I know from experience that I have a very difficult time if I jump from 9 x 12 to 24 x 36. Scaling up brings new considerations to brushwork, the general impact of any given color / value relationships, and the amount of detail to include or edit. What works at 9 x 12 may or may not work at 24 x 36. I can't look at a 9 x 12 painting and tell whether it'll work on a large canvas, so scaling up in baby steps allows me to avoid wasting a whole lot of time, effort, and paint on a big doomed canvas. Given enough practice, I'm sure I'll be able to take larger steps in scaling up, but I'm not there yet.

The second thing I wanted to try was to paint this in a limited palette. I used White, Ultramarine, Yellow Ochre, and Transparent Oxide Red. It's a muted primaries palette, which gives me a lot of control over subtle harmonies (it's really hard to get out of control because you don't have much saturation to start with ). Often this palette results in a earthy, tonalist look of the pre-impressionist dead guys. It has that old dusty look of paintings created in the studio rather than out there in the natural light. I kinda like that.

Unnamed Road, 12 x 21 inches, oil on linen

Some of the passages in the previous painting got quite thick (by my standards), though I wasn't necessarily looking for impasto treatment. I liked it, so I decided to go thicker overall with this next painting. This canvas is also a little bigger, although the scale of the painted elements aren't any bigger. The paved road is replaced by a dirt road, which gives it a different feel, don't you think?

The palette is expanded; White, Ultramarine, Black, Cad Lemon, Yellow Ochre, Permanent Red, and Transparent Oxide Red. This is a double primaries palette with a high and low chroma of each of the primaries. I basically added to the earlier palette the option to use more saturation. Having the earlier painting next to the easel as reference, I felt confident that my colors weren't going to get out of control Where I did use more saturated notes I was careful not to make big jumps. It worked pretty well.

Now I've got a group of paintings to stare at. And I have an idea for the next step.