This painting was long overdue. I'd had these tundra colours for a while and had…
Looking At You
So here it is. I’ve finally gotten around to using the second of the shelves I helped myself to when the in laws threw out that old fridge. The first shelf was used for The Eye In The Sky back in 2020.
Just as before I started by sanding down mostly the class and then putting on a couple of thick coats of Daniel Smith watercolour ground, in both cases leaving a hole in the top left for the eye to peep through.
For the landscape, I picked another scene from Nuuk in Greenland as I wanted a cold scene befitting the shelf’s former life and was planning to use the Tundra supergranulators. I’ve used a lot of artistic license here, it just deliberately changing the colour of the house from blue to green (to suit my choice of paints) but also the loo) of the house, adding a third set of windows to the front as I’d got proportions wrong, drawing by sight rather than doing any accurate measurements.
And then the colours went down. Tundra blue, pink and violet in the sky. Tundra blue, pink, violet and orange in the foreground, tundra green on the house with a dark colour mixed from the tundras for the roof. I also went over some whites with titanium white at the end and pit on a titanium white spatter.
This whole stage of laying down colour was great fun. For once, every extra bit of layering/fiddling just kept making things look better. I loved the pinks and violets in the sky but was then absolutely staggered by how the pinks and oranges looked in the foreground, warming things up nicely. How I ever got myself to stop painting I really don’t know.
Finally I taped an eye to the back of the painting. I decided to go for my Logical Right Eye, a painting that’s been earmarked for a job like this for a long time.
So, how does it look in the end? Well, if it wasn’t for I Am The Eye In The Sky, I might be happier. Compared to that older painting, this one feels inferior. The eye doesn’t harmonise as well with the rest of the painting. Maybe I should have stuck the eye on the back before I started painting. And I definitely should have should have picked colours that harmonised with the eye rather than colours that made for a good painting without eye. Without the eye, though, would this be a good painting? I’m still not convinced. The sky is good enough and foreground is off the charts but the house feels a bit shaky. I’m having a bad run on buildings; maybe I should do some empty landscapes for a while, especially when it comes to painting in that perspex sheet I have prepared. This one ended up getting binned – it was too big to be worth keeping around and/or spraying with preservative.
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