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Work in Torturous Progress
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Message
Posted
Well, this is a work in progress, if progress is the word.
I've been struggling with it for a while now, because I hadn't really worked out what I was going to do with all that foreground: knew I wanted to show a contrast between a foreboding sky and one of those sunlit spots you can get, but pitched the horizon too high and found I had an awful lot of land in front of me that I didn't know what to do with.....
I've been working on it today, and it may be coming round at last (and then again .....) but this photo is of the painting as it was when I last put it away and turned it to the wall. IF it comes right, sort of, I'll show the next stage later. If it doesn't, just assume I've put my foot right through it. 
Posted
Interesting ideas all.... there are some very obvious problems with the foreground - the path has its features and colours basically reversed: this is a chalk path with a central strip of green, and I've painted it (thus far) all back to front. Issue number one - I won't enumerate all the rest, but that was the howler from which much else followed. The real issue though is the tonal problems - stronger colours in the distance than in the foreground; I should make a tonal study - transfer the image into monochrome, which would throw up the real nature of the problem tonally although the compositional glitches would remain..... a tree or fence would help from that point of view: I could get away with a bit of fencing, there are fences up there on the downs: trees are fewer and farther between, but there are one or two.....
Anyway, I'm trying to bring it together slowly; I think it does now look a bit better, but you know the problems with this sort of thing - you get to the point where you can't actually see the picture any more, all you can see is different bits of it; you don't get a sense of the whole. The thing you've all spotted is that the more intense colour lies in what would normally be the background, while the foreground has nothing to push it back - it dominates the thing.
I shall continue to give this thought, while simultaneously not overworking it (you hope....).... on the whole, it's an example of the need to work out your tonal study before just ploughing the paint on; and not letting one dominant idea crowd out those other pesky little details required to make a painting work as a whole.
Posted
David posted while I was doing the same - what am I going to do? Well, what I'm doing immediately is address the tonal imbalance - until I do that, nothing is going to work. Then I'll try to correct the compositional problem - tree, fence, possibly stronger grasses, bolder stems, maybe my favourite way out of a problem in this sort of thing, a stand of gorse.....
I'll do something with it, just so you can see how I tried to resolve the problem: doesn't mean I'll succeed, but maybe it'll be of interest to watch the process..... in a sad, head-shaking, tutting sort of way....
Posted
nbsp??? 'Thickie' here, online at this moment, would appreciate a translation of this, if there is someone not too exasperated with a wrinkly to humour her...Syd, how about you giving it a go at translation?? These...'acronyms'? keep coming thick and fast...Please bring me into the 21st Century! Is it 'nibbles peanuts'? ...looks like that.
Posted
The 'nbsp' crops up in postings on all sorts of websites sometimes, and is something - I think - to do with line breaks. The more technically literate can advise - it's not visible to me on your posting, by the way, so a) is it still there on your screen? b) if it is, it might be whatever device you're using having some trouble communicating with this website, to put things in a probably completely misleading way.....
I've worked on the painting this evening, anyway - in between reading vast amounts of information on paint online - repainted the foreground, altered the colour of the middle ground to make it less synthetically green without losing the contrast, put in a vertical: I still can't "see" it ..... I need to head for the pillows and duvet, and take another look tomorrow. But it's somewhat less crude, and I hope the tonal values are more convincing...............
We shall see!
Good learning experience, whatever else it might be - and I think this WIP idea is a good one: you have to be prepared to show your work at its worst, of course, but there's a value in that.
Anyway - bed-time!
Posted
Just in passing - the struggle with this painting has caused me to think about ways of making the foreground more interesting - I wonder what you all think about introducing figures into a painting? Some do, some never do - I think, to declare myself in advance, that it's probably not a great idea to include them as an after-thought, in order to zhoosh your painting up a bit: if I'm going to introduce a figure, I really want to have decided to do that when I started, not push one in to provide a focal point. I have a similar view of birds - many of us (me included) introduce the obligatory V-shapes into the sky in order to make it a bit livelier - I tend not to do it now, but am not dead set against it..... Is this just a conventional touch to bring our paintings to life when we've failed to do so by other means?
Or am I being a bit puritanical?
It would be very interesting to know what others think - I'm sure others have contemplated just the same problem.
Posted
Syd, you're clearly right. Because this reply is going to knock your latest posting back, NB all: Syd has a new acrylic on the Gallery - so take a look.
This though is the next stage of my Work In Progress - done no favours at all by being photographed indoors with the flash - can't turn the flash off, or you'd not see it at all. And I can't easily take it outside to photograph it properly. So still a WIP.
Back to Syd and figures - yes, they inevitably become the focal point, which is fine if that's what you intended, but introducing them at a late stage is a bit of a sign of desperation! So I haven't.....
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