From the Artist: This painting has been modified for dramatic effect, if you will, and is of an old house off the coast of Maine. I wanted to work with more texture on the canvas -- I used a lot of paint for such a small landscape piece. I used acrylic paint as an undercoat to build-up texture. It dried pretty quickly.
From the Painting Guide: I love the way you've used texture to suggest clouds, along with tone, while the heightened color gives me a sense of sunset at the end of a searing summer's day. Of the landscape and buildings have baked all day and now having some respite as cooling shadows are being cast as the sun sinks. The slice of building on the left-hand side of the composition enhances this feeling of a story I get as I look at the painting.
As you're happy working with acrylic in your initial layers (some oil purists shudder at the thought), you should look at the various acrylic mediums available, especially the texture pastes. These also dry relatively rapidly enabling you to get going with your oils, and can be a cheaper way to build up texture than using paint.
Things to Consider When Looking at This Painting:
Suggest Rather than Explain: For me great paintings suggest things rather than show everything in detail. They leave things to be completed or interpreted in the viewer's mind. Consider how often you've actually seen a complete sky these colors, yet looking at the painting your brain has no problem understanding it as such. You don't need to see the sun in the painting to know it's influenced these colors, you don't need to see how close to the horizon it is.
Composition: Spend a moment tracing the strong lines and shapes in this composition. The square shapes of the buildings contrast with the diagonals of the trees and both of these with the curves in the sky. Notice how the horizontal lines pull your eye across the composition, while the verticals (including the rectangles of the windows, doors, and chimneys) push your eye up into the sky. Have you noticed that the lighter tone in the sky loosely echoes the trianglesof the tree tops, creating a subtle unity between them?
From the Painting Guide: I love the way you've used texture to suggest clouds, along with tone, while the heightened color gives me a sense of sunset at the end of a searing summer's day. Of the landscape and buildings have baked all day and now having some respite as cooling shadows are being cast as the sun sinks. The slice of building on the left-hand side of the composition enhances this feeling of a story I get as I look at the painting.
As you're happy working with acrylic in your initial layers (some oil purists shudder at the thought), you should look at the various acrylic mediums available, especially the texture pastes. These also dry relatively rapidly enabling you to get going with your oils, and can be a cheaper way to build up texture than using paint.
Things to Consider When Looking at This Painting:
Suggest Rather than Explain: For me great paintings suggest things rather than show everything in detail. They leave things to be completed or interpreted in the viewer's mind. Consider how often you've actually seen a complete sky these colors, yet looking at the painting your brain has no problem understanding it as such. You don't need to see the sun in the painting to know it's influenced these colors, you don't need to see how close to the horizon it is.
Composition: Spend a moment tracing the strong lines and shapes in this composition. The square shapes of the buildings contrast with the diagonals of the trees and both of these with the curves in the sky. Notice how the horizontal lines pull your eye across the composition, while the verticals (including the rectangles of the windows, doors, and chimneys) push your eye up into the sky. Have you noticed that the lighter tone in the sky loosely echoes the trianglesof the tree tops, creating a subtle unity between them?