New watercolor painting – “Side Street”
"Side Street"
12″ x 20″
This painting began as a demonstration painting created for the residents of Equinox Village in Manchester Vermont. The scene is adapted from pencil sketches done on Cape Cod in the early 1990′s. Though the sketches are older, the sense of place from that July morning has stayed with me. Although the Cape is a popular vacation area in the summer, and has all the things that go with that, the backroads and village streets away from the tourist areas are as quaint as one would expect. The original sketches were created on a July morning, with bright sun already raking the streets, creating dramatic shade and shadow in contrast to streets, yards, fences and homes washed in brilliant light.
The challenge for this painting was two-fold: first, painting for an audience presents its own challenges in trying to balance speech – explaining techniques, color choices and thinking – while maintaining a focus on the work in progress; Second, balancing the many shade and shadow areas with the sun-struck portions of the painting. Speaking while painting I managed. More difficult was getting the shade and shadow areas just dark enough to convey the point without creating the sense of a “black-hole”. The bottom half of the painting – edge of a building to the left, its small side yard, the large expanse of street, a white picket fence line, and the yard with tree to the right, are all shadow. Since the main focus of the painting is the white cottage home in the upper center-right, the value difference between this large area and the brightly lit street that leads to the house needed to be minimized. Low intensity color in the mid-value range accomplish the sense of shadow without creating too much contrast. Detail is also kept to a minimum in this area – in fact there is not much detail in any area of the painting – only the illusion of it.
My audience commented on the choice of color for the secondary house, the red-orange one, in the upper left. True, it was somewhat of a dangerous or – can I say it – daring choice. Yet it was a conscious to add that color in that location in order to help draw the eye into the background where the focal point is placed. The painting is dominated by cool color – green, mostly, with cool blues and violets as well. The introduction of the warmer hues provides movement, contrast and relief from the overall cool dominance. Red, as the complement of green, adds a glow that helps convey the sense of bright sunlight ” bounced” from lit surfaces into the shady areas. By the way, this red color is a low intensity red that looks brighter because of its placement in an environment that is saturated in its complement. The color itself is a hue called “Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet” produced by Daniel Smith Artists Materials. It is a deep, cool, gray red, and is a favorite color of mine. It mixes quite well with a range of blues to produce transparent grays and gray-violets.
In addition to the red house, a number of warm areas were introduced into the painting to support the sense of bounced light and to keep the eye moving through the painting. The extreme foreground fence post had a good bit of warm grey-orange on the foreground face. From there, one can find touches of warmth in all of the fence lines as well as in the doorway of the focal point house, in the tree trunks and in the cast shadows.
I have made several paintings out of these sketches, all very similar in composition. Below is another version done some years ago.
"Cottage"
11″ x 15″
Private collection
This version takes a similar perspective of looking up the street toward a house catching the raking light of a summer day. Notice the differences in the two paintings in terms of color choices, point of view & value range
Contact me if you have an interest in this or any other paintings on the site. Email me at tc@tonyconner.com or by phone at 802-375-5548.
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