New Work: Gathering Light III, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

 In the studio

$10500 framed
 
About this oil:
It was thoroughly enjoyable to start an oil of this size and to create an opportunity to push those reds across 5 feet of canvas. Those intense colors instantly dictated that the rest of the landscape would require brighter colors everywhere.
 
As surreal as this scene is, the addition of green makes the scene somehow more acceptable and natural. As the rest of the colors are pushed, care was taken to keep them all in sync with the outrageous background. It was quite the puzzle, resulting in this painting being months in the making with a lot of downtime in between sessions before all of the solutions were found.
 
There is one part of the oil that is not engaged as powerfully and that is the strip of sky at the top. As the painting developed, I kept looking beyond the bright hills and into that peaceful and normal part of the sky that was painted in at the beginning. I continued to keep those clouds as they were even as the other colors became stronger.
 
That unexpected combination of the natural and the extreme makes the work even more unusual and attractive.