From the Artist: This is a favourite place of mine, the lakefront in my town. I thought it might appeal to tourists as a keepsake of their visit, but something's not right with it. Is it boringly blah? Is my composition all wrong? I don't think I've got a focal point although I'd intended it to be the tip of land jutting out. I had great difficulty with the tree and don't like its 'dotty' look. I just don't have the technical skills or experience to carry it off. But I did like the way I had the sun on the hilltops in the distance.
From the Painting Guide: There's the whole debate about painting for yourself vs painting for a market, how the latter will corrupt your creativity and originality etc. that you might just take to heart given your problems with this painting. But I think it's more probably that you didn't clarify what you were going to do well enough before you started so it's a painting with disparate parts rather than a unified scene.
By itself the tree is nice in a loose, Impressionist style, but in this painting it competes and clashes with the round hills. The dark branches in the tree echo the dark lines of the jetty and shore, but also create confusion as it's not clear what is tree and what isn't.
In terms of composition rules, the sandy shore shouldn't end in the corner, but rather more definitely above or to the right so it doesn't pull the viewer's eye out the composition so strongly. The distant hills are beautifully painted, but are you aware of at the pattern you've created with each element in front of them? There's a series of steps, with the shorter line of the rounded hills, then the line of the jetty, then the line of the tree. The viewer's eye gets to the tree and is pushed to the left by the strong diagonals, then upwards by the birds. There's not a focal point strong enough to bring the eye to a rest. Having a trunk on the tree may well do this if it showed some shore to the right of it.
From the Painting Guide: There's the whole debate about painting for yourself vs painting for a market, how the latter will corrupt your creativity and originality etc. that you might just take to heart given your problems with this painting. But I think it's more probably that you didn't clarify what you were going to do well enough before you started so it's a painting with disparate parts rather than a unified scene.
By itself the tree is nice in a loose, Impressionist style, but in this painting it competes and clashes with the round hills. The dark branches in the tree echo the dark lines of the jetty and shore, but also create confusion as it's not clear what is tree and what isn't.
In terms of composition rules, the sandy shore shouldn't end in the corner, but rather more definitely above or to the right so it doesn't pull the viewer's eye out the composition so strongly. The distant hills are beautifully painted, but are you aware of at the pattern you've created with each element in front of them? There's a series of steps, with the shorter line of the rounded hills, then the line of the jetty, then the line of the tree. The viewer's eye gets to the tree and is pushed to the left by the strong diagonals, then upwards by the birds. There's not a focal point strong enough to bring the eye to a rest. Having a trunk on the tree may well do this if it showed some shore to the right of it.