The View from my Window

OK, back to plein air painting! Well, to be precise, I was not out painting 'en plein air' but instead was sitting on our little sun terrace, painting the view across the street. I love this view, and it was one of the reasone this house appealed to me so much. (For the story of how we came to buy a new house, see this other blog.) What I'm interested in exploring, though, is not necessarily the details of the view itself. The subject of my paintings seems to be paint - how the paint looks on canvas, how colors look next to each other, blended with each other, interwoven with each other. this painting was done almost exclusively in two colors, yellow ochre and untramarine blue, with just a tiny bit of burnt siena added to the mix here and there. All with large amounts of white of course. I've been using oils, which are not my usual medium. Although I have used oils in the past, for the last 10 years or so, I've almost always used acrylics, and worked mostly in my studio on more abstract paintings. Because they dry so quickly, however, acrylics aren't very adaptable to painting anywhere but in the studio. So I've decided, in the interest of painting on site, to get reacquainted with the lushness of oil paints. This blog will be a record not just of the paintings themselves, but of my experiences as I re-discover the possibilities and frustrations of oils as a medium.

In this painting, I started with very thin washes and loved the look at first. But once I started to add more painting, things got out of hand and I had to pretty much scrape everything away and start again. My favorite paint effect in this painting is the scumbled paint at the horizon on the left hand side. I like that look of one color covering another, letting just glimpses of the underlaying color show through.