Straight Ahead

A soft pastel painting today, the first in over a month. It seems I’m always a bit behind on stying in practice at everything but that’s my fault for using so many different media to paint so many different subjects. Oh well. This is a scene in Queendown Warren. I trust soft pastels more with nature than I do with buildings.

You know how this works by now. I worked from the back to the front, using whatever colours felt right at the time and blending them with fingers, colour shapers, paper stumps and kitchen paper. I tried to use bright yellows on the right of trees and dark greens and browns on the left and underneath, so the light is coming from the top right.

To create a bit of depth, I found myself using the dark umber pastel (my second darkest after black) in lots of places on trees that were behind other trees with bright yellow highlights. The contrasts here were so interesting that I added more of the dark umber at the end without smoothing, creating some hard edges. Hard edges are a rarity in my soft pastel paintings and ChatGPT keeps telling me to include some, and this was a golden opportunity.

I also used the dark umber, along with blues and purples, to create some amazing shadows on the left. The problem was that they unbalanced the painting. More than half my time with this painting was spent in the bottom right quarter, trying to create something interesting. I tried creating grassy texture with whites, then with whites, blues, reds and purples. Swirly textures didn’t work. Nor did bumpy grassy hummocks. In the end I just went for shadows in similar colours to those on the left. They must be cloud shadows or maybe shadows of non-existent out of shot trees. Come to think of it, the shadows on the left shouldn’t be there either. Maybe they’re cloud shadows, or maybe the sun’s coming in from front left and the two middleground trees are wrong.

I’m going to stop thinking about shadows and look at the painting’s artistic merits. It’s now well balanced. The path leads to a centre of interest in the yellow field behind the fence. A fence that I smudged a little as it was looking too sharp against what was behind it. The centre of interest is a bit too central though. And there’s a strong feeling of emptiness. It feels like it needs a dog walker but I wasn’t feeling confident in my ability to add rough pastel figures. Maybe it will feel less empty when it’s framed and loses a bit off the bottom. Anyway, it’s still good enough to go up for sale, maybe even in the Rose & Crown ar some point. Its price can be found here.