Evolution of a Work - "Back Field in Summer Sun"

This is a pastel painting of a hill on our farm.  I've always loved the clusters of white pine trees, with their big masses, how they anchor the hillside.

"Back Field in Summer Sun" completed

This is the initial start of the painting, begun on location.  You can see that my initial efforts in a painting are to establish the placement of forms in their relation to each other.  I usually carefully consider the overall composition before I start feeling out the masses and movement.  When I start, I usually like the mark-making to be free and loose, not thinking too much, but instead feeling until it takes shape.  In choosing the blue color, I needed its darker value to 'hold in place' the big shapes of the trees, and to create a sense of coolness. The foreground fields were a warmer, lighter green, with early spring grasses just coming through.  As I laid these in, I then noticed the slightly reddish tint of the dried winter grasses remaining, and quickly put that in so I could remember this when working on the painting in my studio. I really love this sense of discovery while working on location, which is a big part of why I begin many of my pieces en plein air.

Initial sketch

Back in my studio, I added more foreground color, and then used a wash (solvent and bristle brush to liquify the pastel) to unify the colors and shapes.  I often do this to help create the background of a painting, and then later layer onto this specific details.  The clouds started to appear to balance the composition.  The cloud on the top left in particularly helps balance the composition by returning the eye throughout the piece (rather than drifting off the top left).   I feel these decisions intuitively- it is only retrospectively that I think of them as 'action steps."  If I think too logically at the time, the painting becomes stilted and doesn't grow.

More developed

To finish the painting, I layered color over color in the foreground, to create a rich texture of visible strokes and to give the feeling of winter and spring grasses meeting.  I darkened and unified the pine tree shapes, restating the dark masses and value contrasts which had first appealed to me with the subject.