I spent this weekend with friends on Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod. It was sunny and warm and about as near perfect as a few days can be. The Cape part I spent in the company of friend and fellow painter, Christie Stewart, and this morning we got up early and walked to a lovely little pond and set up our easels on the beach.
My set up
(Here you can see me working very hard, clearly laying in front of my easel, feet up):
Here's the study of the lovely little pond (which I jumped into as soon as I cleaned up my paints):
I find painting still water with reflections particularly hard, because it's so easy to make it look cheesy. I also find it particularly hard to paint big clumps of trees where the individual silhouettes of the trees are not visible. So, brilliantly, with this painting, I set myself up with a subject I find doubly tricky. But for a study, I do not think it so terrible in the end.
Not terrible at all; a nice little study.
ReplyDeleteI don't pretend to be a landscape painter but I do find that when tackling scenes like this it's often helpful to differentiate the reflected forms a little more. By that I mean-- Though the water's surface does indeed reflect like a mirror, it's not a mirror, so imparting some of the water color into those mixtures helps to distinguish the jump.