Flat Light Grazers

Oil on Board, 7.5 x 10 inches

This is a funny time of year for us landscape painters.  I trudged for about a mile with my backpack containing tripod, panel holder and palette attachments, paints, brushes, bottles of spirit (for brush cleaning, not drinking!), rags and camera, looking for something to paint, but Spring is late this year after all the cold and wet weather, and the bankside vegetation has been flattened.  After a frustrating hour or so, ploughing alongside an Oil-Seed Rape field at least 12ft high and tangly Goose-Grass and Burdock, I emerged, determined to paint something en plein air, so settled on this bend.

Looking like a tramp, covered in yellow pollen and adorned with burs and cleavers I set up the easel on mud.  You can see how high the water had been, with the tangle of debris on the Hawthorn on the right. As time went by, both I and the easel sank into the mud, so my perspective of the view altered a little...... 

The light was very flat, with little in the way of illumination, but I managed to get down bits of lighter green patches on the field on the far bank.  The good thing about flat light is that the scene doesn't change much, so there is more time to paint and less panic as the light changes. After an hour and a bit, the sun was disappearing behind the trees on the right, so I packed up and started the unenviable treck back through the jungle of triffids.