This week is bringing us some gorgeous weather here in central Virginia, so on the way home from the farmer’s market last night, I took a detour and decided to keep a recent promise that I made to myself. IÂ returned to Young’s Pond to paint the evening scene I’d scouted out when I was there the prior week for a morning painting session:
Willow in Back-light”
Oil on Canvas, 12×16″
Click here for more info!
Having already conceptualized what I was going to paint in advance, I set up quickly and dove right into the painting. It was a good thing, too. Even though I started relatively early in the evening (5 PM) all of that beautiful back-lighting did not last. After about an hour and a half, the sun sank quickly behind the trees on the distant hill, and took all of that beautiful backlighting with him!
Luckily I got the painting about 90% complete. As I later told my husband, “I had the essence but not the poetry”. This is what I hoped for as I worked on the final 10% immediately after I returned home to the studio (while everything was still fresh in my mind). Mainly it was just a matter of softening some edges and adjusting a value here and there, (and trying not to do too much for fear of losing the essence!)
12×16″ is not a huge painting, but it’s the largest I’ve done in plein air in a while. One of my goals (goal number 274!) is to increase my plein air sizes beyond 12×16″ or even 16×20″. With more canvas to cover, it may require multiple visits to the same site at the same time of day, but it would be interesting to see how far I could push it. We’ll see…I have the whole summer ahead of me yet.
p.s. I’ve finally uploaded the info for the previous plein air painting I did at this location last week. Read the details for that work here.
Jennifer
Young; Vibrant LandscapesOil Paintings and Art Prints Online
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