Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Painting Atmospheric Effects in Oils



Sometimes a painting is not about a particular thing , rather it is about the space around the apparent subject. In this case the subject is not the farmhouse, but about the Tuscan landscape. Here in a couple of hours I rendered a small painting of the Tuscan atmosphere as the hills recede into the distance. Flattening out the treatment of the distant hills makes any detail in the foreground look more close and intimate, but there really is very little detail in this picture. Using warm yellow ochre and some orange and reds muted back in almost everything, even the greens, "warms" the tonal range of the picture to capture that warm summer in the Italian countryside as a day is setting. I could take this basic picture now and warm it and soften it further by adding glazes, but it needs to dry a bit before that can happen. That would be done with oily glaze mixes using burnt sienna. An artist that I love is George Inness if you want to study more atmospheric qualities of light in the way he handled his
landscape subject.

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