Tuesday 21 October 2014

Hay Bales and Thistledown

Oil on Board, 14 x 20 inches

I liked the low viewpoint of this composition, with roly-poly bales I love to paint, with a good bunch of Thistles in the foreground in their gorgeous seed-head stage, with bunches of candyfloss down ready to blow away and colonise elsewhere. I've always thought that the seed-heads of Creeping Thistle are very much like the old-fashioned shaving brushes!

I put a figure running a terrier in the mid-distance, just to add a bit of life to the pastoral scene. I might put this as a late entrant for the ROI exhibition, depending what reaction it gets here and on Facebook. With the Thistledown, I might normally have tackled this in Pastel, but I rather enjoyed trying to depict the down with Oil, using a hog brush to describe the softness.

2 comments:

  1. Peter, this is a lovely scene, beautifully painted, but having grown up working in hay fields, I can't help but cringe when I see that thistle getting ready to spread into the field: I want to take a shovel into your painting and hack it down. The thistle is beautifully painted, though.

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    Replies
    1. Ha ha, thanks Mitch, and apologies, bit that's how it was!

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