“Light Dusting”

10″ x 14″

This scene could depict either the early time of winter when light snows begin to cover the fields, or late winter when the snow cover is receding.  The title gives a hint that it is early winter and in fact that time of year is the inspiration. Unlike most of my work, this painting has a very limited and muted color palette – necessary for a realistic depiction of the terrain as it looks in early winter.

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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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.

The beginning of our winter was snowier than usual, so it had me thinking about the landscape as it looks and feels covered with snow.

All new paintings have to start with an inspiration and an idea. When beginning a new work, I often look back at sketchbooks – new and old – for the inspiration. This time around, I came upon a pencil sketch created over two years ago.

The sketch was made on site in an area west of Shaftsbury, VT. I call it the Myers Road area, because it’s generally the road I take to find a good painting or sketching spot.

Although the sketch was done on a cloudy and – according to the notes scribbled on the page – windy November day, there was no snow on the ground. When looking at the sketch this time around, the value arrangement was such that I was reminded of a snow covered landscape. The inspiration was found – rolling hills and farmland on a cold winter day.

When creating a studio painting, I create many sketches – both in pencil and with watercolor. In a way, these sketches are the process since they allow me to explore various arrangements of shape, color and value that will support the main idea of the work. For this composition, the initial few pencil thumbnail sketches and color compositions were created concurrently, working on one, going to another, maybe coming back to an earlier one and so on.

This is the page with my pencil sketches – it is the page from a 9” x 12” sketchbook. All of the sketches, even the larger one at the top took minutes to complete, at most. Although it may appear that they were all were created at the same time, they were actually created individually, from top to bottom and left to right between January 16 and January 22, as a reaction or response to an earlier pencil or color sketch.

The first color sketches were created based on the first (topmost) pencil sketch.

This sketch explores abstract design and color. Another initial color sketch, not shown here,  was painted to explore shape and certain details.

After a couple of days of living with the initial sketches, I went back to work on the composition. For this part, I wanted to create some additional color sketches in order to explore some different color mixtures and different treatment of the sky. In all, four color studies were created, each about 6” x 9” in size. The sketch below seemed to best support the main idea.

All four sketches explored color combinations and value shapes as they might appear in the finished work. At this stage,  none of them grabbed me. I liked the composition of shapes and value, but felt that none depicted the emotion and drama I wanted in the painting.

I took a break from working on the sketches and decided to refresh the paint on my palette. Maybe it was the look of the paint as it oozed from the tubes, but a couple colors that I hadn’t considered previously really caught my eye. I quickly  worked these colors into three new color sketches shown in order below.

These sketches came together quickly. The first is very abstract, concerned more with shape and value. The second is a bit more representative and focuses on balance, contrast and movement. The third explores color and refines the foreground detail just a bit.

If you are still with me this far, congratulations and thank you. In some respects, the process is tedious and boring looking in from the outside.  It was difficult to keep the description of it this short. Creation of  this composition played out over the course of about one week.  In reality, this process can stretch out over the course of days, weeks or months. What is described here is the externally active parts of the process. What I have left largely un-described is the back and forth action between activity and thought; between exploration and evaluation. It is in this part of the process that the painting is truly created.

With inspiration, idea and composition in hand, the paper and board were prepared, the composition transferred and the painting underway. The painting that results from this process will be posted as soon as it is done, most likely within the coming week.

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