Thursday, March 17, 2016

Iris Shoots Along the Slough

oil on hardboard panel, 8" x 10"

This little painting I started the other day at Covelo Ranch, thinking I'd work on it some more yesterday, but I had only brought two little palette knives with me.  Eventually, frustration overtook the project and I ended up wiping it.  Oh well, there's always another day, but I thought I'd memorialize it here, poor thing.  

I've been reading a large, fascinating tome about Vincent van Gogh entitled, "Van Gogh:  The Life," by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, and I've been letting my colors veer a bit from what is considered "correct," in search of my own sense of color harmony.  Van Gogh himself decried abstract painting, but in the last year of his life he loosened that view as his paintings veered ever closer to abstraction themselves.  I was attempting to do that here, with the turquoise grass in the upper left corner, simply because I found it so beautiful against the brownish water and linking it to two of the iris shoots next to the tree trunk.  I hope to explore this whole idea more in my paintings, but will need all the tools at my disposal for it.

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