Tales from the Crypt

Artifical Respiration

I had a look through a stack of painting starts that never found their way. All good candidates for the Dead Painting Society. I decided to perform some artificial respiration on one of them.

This painting was a studio confection which began life as a really nice grisaille. I then proceeded to drive every semblance of quality out of it. It wound up in the corner of the studio that is occupied by the halt and the lame.

I put in a sky yesterday, mostly slashing brushstrokes covering up a tall mountain, some snow, etc. I brought the sky down to form a new tree line on the horizon. Most of that edge was merely where the sky strokes arbitrarily ended. Then I set about repairing some of the sky, modulating the slashes a bit. Here's where it stands at the moment. It definitely has a mood of sorts, but it's not yet breathing on its own. 

The sky was originally a mixture of yellow and yellow ochre. I just went at it with a large brush. Here are two close-ups of the upper left and upper right.

 

 

Even if this eventually turns out to be an acceptable painting, once I've finally committed to the palette, time of day, actual terrain, it's unlikely to go off to market, even though it's 24" x 30" (61x76 cm).

In my experience, my galleries rarely want very dark paintings, probably because few clients have adequate lighting to display them. So I do this as an exercise, a welcome respite from all those large recent paintings.

As I noodled around in photoshop, doing this post, I came across a photo of some old friends. Although it's not apropos of anything above, I'd like to give them their fifteen minutes of fame. The cocker was Kim's, the springer was mine, and our barn owned the cat. Good companions!