On January 23, I left a post about a new work that was on the board. That post was a somewhat detailed description and illustration of the process of creating a new painting. It included a number of sketches, both in pencil and in watercolor.

Well, the work is finally finished and is presented below - or I should say one version is finished. More on that below.

This watercolor painting is titled “West of Tinkham” and is 9″ h x 13″ w. It is so named simply because the original pencil sketch, made in November 2005, has a note “On Myers Road, west of Tinkham”. This place in Shaftsbury, Vermont is a favorite sketching area of mine. The area is very rural with both a great deal of forested land as well as many open, rolling fields. I enjoy the look of rolling fields in winter. When one thinks of a blanket of snow, the tendency is to think in terms of the whole surface of the earth covered in a uniform layer of snow which covers everything. Even in this snowy part of the world, unless there is a substantial amount of the stuff, the earth generally shows through here and there. For the painting, the task was to create the feeling of those rolling fields and forested hills while also creating a well balanced, well designed watercolor painting.

My earlier post indicated that I expected to finish the work within a week. As often happens, the work took longer than expected. While working on this a painting, there are many short burst of intense “brush and paint to paper” work, and many longer periods of staring at the work while evaluating it - such as it was at each level of completion.

As mentioned above, the point was to create a feeling and mood, in the context of a well designed work. Winter scenes always present a unique design challenge in balancing the values of the various passages - for the most part, winter landscape paintings will always include both whites and very dark darks along with the mid values. As I see it, there must either be more white or more dark with enough mid-value areas to stabilize the value structure. The sky, distant background and dark areas that represent forested land all went in quickly. Then came the non-snow covered fields. Initially, only the immediate foreground, the middle-left field and a small patch of visible earth on the distant far-left field were painted in. The remaining snow-covered fields appeared very stark and empty. I added some subtle, light washes to the snow covered areas in order to tone them down and unify them with the rest of the work. While it helped, it was not enough. Over the course of the past week, I have continued to carefully place additional areas of brown earth - starting first in smaller areas - first the distant field in the upper right, then the closer field in the upper left. Finally, touches of earth showing through on the far distant middle field were added along with some dry brush work in the foreground field on the left. Compare the treatment of these areas to the color sketches in the earlier post.

At the beginning of this post, I remarked that this painting is one version of the painting. It is often the case that a sketch or series of sketches will inspire more than one painting. This is likely the case for this particular series. As mentioned, this is a smaller work. I had in mind the idea that this composition was a good basis for a larger work. In addition, in working through the sketches, several different color schemes seemed to work as well as this one. While the next version is not on the board at the moment, there are likely others to come.