Still Raining, Still Dreaming

This time I put on the paint using a palette knife rather than a a credit card. It was easier this way to access the blobs of paint that I’d squeezed into a porcelain palette.  The paint still settled into the grooves but I applied a lot less of it and didn’t mix it as I was applying it.  When I squirted on water, the paint ran down the page a lot better, although I think I may still have used slightly too much paint.  A little extra directional squirting was applied in places where I thought it was needed.  Later on, while I was busy with sky and trees, I sprinkled some salt on the foreground just at the right time for the special effects to come through.

Then came the sky.  I pulled up a little bit of paint from the foreground and spread it over a wet sky using a brush that was still dirty from a little bit of foreground tinkering.  That already looked good but I also dabbed in a little bit of all my three foreground colours.

And then the trees.  I just took a thinner brush and wherever there were spots along the horizon where the paint hadn’t run and was still thick, I dragged it up into the sky to draw trees.  So the trees were all in different colours, depending on the colour of the paint where they touched the horizon.  The main downside of this pot luck methodology was that I ended up with three equally spaced trees which was a compositional error that I should have seen coming.

While the trees were drying, I added some grasses between them by dragging the existing paint upwards using one of those specialist Terry Harrison brushes.

Then back to the trees.  The first paint layers were fading but still wet, so I touched in some extra paint in places, generally in the same colour.  This actually gave the trees a more three-dimensional appearance.  The tree on the left had spread out sideways as well as fading, so I made it much wider before dabbing in the extra paint.  I added extra paint to this tree a couple more times.

And the end result looks good to me.  There’s so much to like about it: the tree on the left, the fog in the sky and around the trees and grasses, the grasses, the little bit of Indian yellow still showing, the salt effects, the longer dribbles of paint at the bottom.  Oh, and this one is named after a Hendrix track: Jimi is officially up there with Algernon Blackwood as a source of painting names.

This was sold at the 2022 Upchurch Art Exhibition.  It was a couple of weeks later when someone I know in the village came over to chat to me at a Sunday Church Tea and revealed that he’d bought the painting.