Grateful Notices: Greens Moving Across, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches

Exhibited: Sorelle Gallery, Westport, Connecticut
 


My thanks to the purchaser of this oil.
 
About this oil:
This is an oil I started a number of years ago as a compositional sketch. The challenge was to make a line of green trees all the way across the canvas. It sounds simple enough, but once I began to move beyond the sketch, a number of problems began to present themselves and lacking any immediate solutions, I stored it away… for years.
 
For whatever the reason, I saw it in the racks recently and it became the most compelling piece for me to work on. Typically, I have 10 or more canvases in progress and this canvas was added to the mix as first in line.
 
The original composition had a lot of power so more was added with the bright, hot colors at the top and bottom, making the greens brighter. That is a good start, but it didn’t make the trees more interesting. After a lot of strokes, trials and errors, the trees began to take on a life of their own and I happily followed along.
 
By increasing the darks at the bottom and using lighter blue tones at the top, the trees began to take on considerably more mass, perfectly setting up the different greens as they flow across the space. 
 
The entire oil is alive because I allowed the painting to take the lead.