Sunday, January 3, 2010

One Horse in a Blue Moon

Hope you are already enjoying 2010! This is a good example of an oil painting where I combine a variety of themes, goals, and inspirations. Which for me is how I like to paint the most. For example, I was thinking about the recent rare blue moon--it only occurs one ever 19 years on New Year's Eve in fact. So we won't see another until 2028...

I also challenged myself to paint in fairly dark, limited range neutral palette--but of course some color made it's way in as I worked along. So I'd like to try this again and really try to keep the color at a minimum just to see what happens.

Originally, I wanted to play with balancing 2 objects or key shapes, in this case 2 horses, but in the end it wasn't working and I decided to simply paint out the second horse. Just for fun though I left the ghost of his shadow on the left. Ahh artistic license...And to balance the remaining horse I added some mysterious figures (?) on the ridge.

I should note that this was entirely from my head which helps me at least to focus more on shapes, patterns, line, edges, values, etc. This is one of the paintings where I may be tempted to keep playing with it, but it's frankly sometimes best to move on with what you've learned in this one.

For more information about my work or my classes, as always I welcome your emails. Please write to me at the email in my blog header. Have a great first week of 2010!

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