Stonehall, Hartlip

The main three colours were French ultramarine, transparent yellow and Winsor red.  So this is in the key of triadic right, with no close neighbours on the colour circle.  Winsor red was chosen so that it could be used in the road sign; the other two were found by looking through what I’d narrowed down to nine swatch cards (a choice between three possible blued and three possible yellows).  Viridian was also used in the sky and some neutrals and three neutrals were spattered over at the end.

I started by carefully planning my composition and values and then masking out whites and highlights and spattering on some masking fluid to get white spots.  And then I just painted it all in, variegating the colour within washes to keep it interesting.

One of the interesting compositional things about this is that the house is dead centre and not too detailed, whereas the road sign is at a hotspot (2/3rds across, 2/3rds down), in focus and has the strongest difference between adjacent values (black vs white) and complementaries (red vs green).  Effectively the signpost is the centre of interest.  It makes things feel a bit unusual and unsettling.  I’m pleased with this.  Many artists would have just left the signpost out.

That’s not  to say I didn’t leave anything out.  I thought it was sufficient to only show one foreground driveway rather than the two that are there in reality.  And I changed my mind about adding some bare trees at the top by blobbing on wet paint and blowing it around with a plastic tube.  I’d already reached the stage where I could stop painting.

That’s not to say (my words of the day) I did no tinkering.  When I reached the first possible stopping point, I was a bit disappointed in how the painting didn’t hang together, even with the same three primaries everywhere and some interesting shapes.  I could have put a single thin glaze over the top of everything but I thought this might just make things worse.  Or I could have a added Zoltan Szabo-style curtain glaze down the left and right but I’ve not been brave enough to try that yet.  So I tried something new.  I spattered cadmium red, cadmium yellow and the cobalt blue that I just discovered in my stash over everything except the house and the sky.  And this seemed to improve things, which is an interesting discovery.

In the end, yes, I’m happy with this.  If I’m to keep painting these Hartlip scenes, though, I do need to keep pushing myself into trying new approaches and not just churning out similar paintings again and again.  This one was in the shop window for a while but has since been taken down.  I’ve done better stuff than this.