Oil on Linen Canvas, 20 x 28 inches
One of the chocolate-box villages in the Cotswolds, I painted this view of Upper Slaughter in all its verdant, Summer glory. I was lucky that the woman was posing on the bridge, with a lovely, backlit halo around her dark hair and sunlit highlights on her arms. The ancient cottages also provided a nice foil to the abundance of greens in the trees and bankside vegetation. The River Eye and the path, of course, were convenient 'lead-ins' to the composition, with the dark shadowed side of the bridge the darkest dark in the painting.
I am continually impressed with how well you work with greens, and this beautiful piece is yet another example of how you can work in a fairly tight color and value range and produce a very real feeling of being there. You seem to have such mastery of the very slight variations in the greens of nature that surround us, without resorting to what many painters do, which is to use more reds, grays, and browns and limit greens to a much smaller role than they actually play in the world.
ReplyDeleteThank you Mitch! There's no secret, just painting what I see. I enerally use a varying mix of Cad Yellow Light, Permanent Rose, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine and Raw Umber. Many thanks for your comment!
DeleteThis is beautiful Peter. Oh to live in a village like this one! I just want to agree with everything Mitch has said, only he puts it much better than I can so I wont repeat what he has already written. I think greens are incredibly difficult to get right so don't be so modest Peter.... "just painting what I see"... well that's what I do but I don't get the results you do, so there is a lot more to it than that...like talent and ability? :-)
ReplyDeleteThank you very much Bev!The new Cobalt Blue Hue in the Griffin alkyd range of oils is totally different to the old Cobalt Blue, and that mixed with Cad Yellow Light Hue and a little Raw Umber produces a multitude of greens that are out there in nature.
Delete