Here are some shots of the painting I just finished, commissioned by a collector in Atlanta. While I have painted this before, this painting is much larger - 60" wide by 30" high - and I really enjoyed working it at this size. Like most of my work, it began with a photo. I took this one in February 2008, while walking along the frozen shores of Lake Michigan near my hometown of Muskegon:
I ordered the canvas online at French Canvas. They construct them in every imaginable size and build them to last.
My first step was to paint a neutral gray background, then give it the splatter treatment to break it up a bit:
Next, I chopped in some tree forms by painting the negative space with some light blue:
When that was done, I painted in the shapes of the trees:
They needed branches, so those came next:
The thing that struck me about the scene was how a layer of snow had plastered itself on the trees, only in the direction of the wind coming from the lake. So when I was painting white on the black trees, I kept on thinking about that:
Breaking up the white, playing once again with the negative space. I added shadows on the ground, too, the same way.
The last step was to make the shadows on the ground more interesting:
When it was finished I signed it with my initials:
And then smiled for the camera:
April will be a big painting month. I am going to work on about 20 smaller paintings for a show in May. I'll be blogging about it here.
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