The Color of Light: An Artist's Blog

I recently got ambitious and decided to paint a large 24" x 18" landscape. In the past I've been reluctant to paint large for several reasons. First of all, materials are expensive and if a piece doesn't turn out a lot more pigment and surface has been used on a large piece.  But more importantly, I've had the idea that working larger will somehow make it more difficult to produce a painterly loose look. It seems it would be much easier to get sucked into detail when you have so much space to work with.

Working on this piece taught me a few things, the most important being that I LOVE working large. There is something really liberating about having a large space to play with! 

After completing the painting and contemplating it for awhile, I realized that although I am quite satisfied with the result, it did indeed appear more realistic and did not have the painterly and loose quality I had originally set out to achieve.  My husband made an interesting observation that I used the same marks that I make in smaller pieces, so the marks in my smaller pieces look more painterly because they are in a smaller space. I'd need to make larger marks on a larger space in order to achieve the looseness I'm after. Hmmm. Something to contemplate.

Here are a couple of in progress photos. I began by sketching in the shapes with vine charcoal on La Carte card. Then I worked back to front, top to bottom, and dark to light. I massed in the large shapes first and then added smaller details.