Thursday, October 15, 2009

"Shadows of Unrecorded Trees"


I'm (slowly) working out a system where I can work on multiple paintings, most importantly, landscapes, at certain times of the day, returning over and over again to the same locations at the roughly the same time to take advantage of fleeting light conditions. Since I live in Arizona I can pretty much count on sunshine nearly all of the time, but on the rare day that it's cloudy, I hope I'll be painting (you guessed it) clouds.


So, for example, this is the corner of a wall that catches shadow patterns from trees from roughly 8:00am to 9:15am. I worked on this for around two weeks, using binoculars when I felt the need to examine something more closely (and of course just walked over to it whenever I felt like it). When 9:15 came along, I packed my gear and moved on to an indoor still life which caught a certain light at a certain time of the day.


There is so much to recommend in this sequential method. One big plus is that I can work on larger canvases - at least, larger than the small 8" x 10" or so plein air sketch size. I'll write more about this later on.

7 comments:

Sadie J. Valeri said...

Linda this is gorgeous, your sense of color is inspiring!

Nancy Bea Miller said...

Great!

Anonymous said...

stunning work: there is something about shadows on walls and this is probbaly one of the best i have seen in terms of light and composition

Diane Hoeptner said...

Brilliant shadows, love this one.

Jala Pfaff said...

Really beautiful, evocative and a little bit mysterious.

Paul Coventry-Brown said...

Wow! fabulous warm and light filled painting :-)

Linda Tracey Brandon said...

Sadie, Nancy, rahina, Diane, Jala and Paul - you'll all so kind to comment - I really loved painting this one and I'm trying to get outside more often.