"Barn Snowscape"

“5 x 7″

Private Collection

This small work began as a study for a larger composition and took on a life of its own.  The main challenge for this work and for the larger painting was in balancing the warm and cool areas and in unifying the colors.  The background went in first with yellows, oranges and mixed violets for the forest and the trees.  I wanted to use blue  for the snow shadows – primarily cerulean and ultramarine – which I did.  The problem was that the foreground and back ground did not relate.

The solution was to pull background color into the mid and foreground, while bringing the cool blues up into the sky areas.  The barn itself contains colors from all areas of the painting.  Because of this and because it is the focal point of the painting,  it created a great deal of harmony and unity on its own.

There are three other significant locations where color was added specifically to create unity – the silo, where an intense spot of cerulean blue was added high, so that it would overlap the background, while using the deep violets from the woods on the lower parts;  the left forground snow cover has both violets and a spot of warm orange mingled with the ultramarine; and the fence post to the right, which anchors in the foreground and overlaps the mid-ground and background.  The post was the last item painted and received cool blues where it overlaps the background and warm orange-grays where it overlaps the cool snow shadows.

This and other works on this site are available for purchase. 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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“Rural Route”

5″ x 22″

This watercolor painting is unusual in several ways.  It began as a warm up excercise using  an oddly shaped leftover piece of watercolor paper and leftover paint from the mixing areas of my studio palette.  Using a single brush for the entire painting – one of my favorite 1″ flats (Winsor Newton Series 295 aquarelle) and drawing no lines first, I picked up some palette gray.   Palette gray is a term I use for the pools of leftover pigments left on the palette during and after a painting session.  The colors tend to mingle freely creating areas at the edges of the pools where multiple colors have run together forming unusual grays and browns.

The first stroke placed on the paper ultimately became the facing wall of the small, dark gray farm building near the center of the picture.  Once placed, both the color and shape reminded me of a weathered old barn and of a previous winter farm composition – http://tonyconner.com/2008/11/18/new-work-designing-winter/ – and that  became the point of departure.

Trying to stick to the original exercise, I continued to use only the 1″ brush and the gray and brown leftovers from the palette.  The building roofs were created by painting the negative areas of sky and trees around them.  Wanting to add some color punch to the forground I did pick up some cerulean blue for the left foreground and some Ultramarine mixed with some of the “palette brown” for the muddy road.  By the way, I have recently begun using Ultramarine Blue by M. Graham & Co.  I find it to be a terrific watercolor paint, with great color character and intensity.

I finished up the painting by placing the falling down fence in the forground and glazing on some deeper and darker color on the faces of the building that were not catching direct light.
This and other works on this site are available for purchase. 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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“Farm In Winter”

9″ x 12″

Don’t get the wrong impression, I am not pining for winter.  Although I am not a winter sort of guy -  I exist mostly indoors with a mug of hot tea not far away from December to April – there are many things that I find very paintable in the winter landscape.   Anyone who checks this blog often will realize that painting is a process with me.  The process begins with sketches.  Usually, I start with pencil sketches that have been drawn at one time or another, often outdoors  on location.  In this case, I came across the sketch, below,  from an older sketchbook.  It usually my habit to note the date and time of the sketch, although this one had no such notations, so I am not sure where the scene really is or when I sketched it.

In any case, I liked the composition a good bit, without much change.  The scene is suggestive of summer or fall, with lots of leaves on the trees.   I decided to go straight to a color sketch, rather than to pencil thumbnails.  One feature I wanted to emphasize in the final painting was the low, elongated left hand barn building.  In drawing the contours of the buildings for the color sketch, I elongated this building even more and connected it to its mate.  I wanted to suggest larger, complex farm building arrangement so added additional shapes that suggested additional buildings, sheds and/or wings.  To emphasize the “horizontal-ness” of the building, I also made the sketch in an elongated, or panoramic format. The actual size of the sketch is 2 1/2″ x 6″.

Although winter was not on my mind as I began to work, the contours were suggesting a peaceful and calm winter day. The notion of calm led to the selection of green as the local color of the barn buildings, since both color and value contrast would need to be minimized in order to convey “peace”.

The color sketch is shown below.

Color sketch for “Farm in Winter”

2 1/2″ x 6″

As you can see, I went to a more conventional “landscape” format for the final painting, thinking that it would actually emphasize the shape of the focal point even more.  I also brought the building forward and balanced their collective weight in the upper right, with the muddy road, a scrubby leftovers from fall in the lower left foreground.