This painting isn't a pure abstract, but rather an abstraction created from a 'real' landscape. It was done in acrylic using the following colors: titanium buff, titanium white, cadmium scarlet, cadmium orange, Mars orange (a mixture of PY42 and PR101), and Turner’s yellow (a lovely ‘dirty’ yellow from Liquitex, made from arylide yellow PY3 and yellow oxide PY42). It’s painted on canvas, size 250x650mm (about 10x26 inches). I bought a few of these unusually proportioned canvases when I saw them in my local art-supply shop because the shape appealed to me and I thought they’d work well with some kind of tree subject.
I set out knowing it was going to be far more of an abstract painting, with colors that reflected the intense heat and dryness of the area where these grow. I did a few thumbnail sketches with the shape of my canvas in mind, then picked my favorite and got painting. I started by sketching in the elements of the abstract painting with a pencil (you can’t see this very clearly in the photo). Then, using a size 12 filbert brush, I painted the first color in, the Turner’s yellow. Look closely and you’ll see the brush strokes follow or echo the half-circle of the sun as well as the horizontal band at the bottom.
I left the part of the sun I would be painting scarlet and orange white as I would be using these colors straight from the tube for the intense sun and, as they’re both quite opaque colors, they’d just hide any Turner’s yellow anyway.
