More Green

 

Finally. The upper right leaves from a foreground tree are a nice warm green. I was able to break out the sap green and mix it with Gamblin's radiant yellow. Some sections have a touch of Rembrandt's cadmium yellow deep but I found the radiant yellow got me a more intense color.

 

 The farm has this craggy tree right next to the rock wall. I could have made it "pretty" but I found parts of it were quite interesting. I didn't paint every branch but went for the elements which in my mind defined the tree.

 The foreground grass and vegetation are rather loose. With all that is going on in the painting I didn't want one's eyes to stop on really detailed foreground plants/weeds. I did however want to make sure the brightest and warmest greens were on this side of the rock wall.

 

 

 

Rocks

 

 

The rock wall in the background has few colors but to make the foreground rock wall read well I put strokes of raw sienna and blues in the shadows and played around with the warm sunlit colors. This is all to the right of the tree. To the left of the foreground tree I went with cooler colors to help that portion of the wall recede in to the middle ground.

 

 

 

Rock Walls & Gates

 

The background rock wall is "bluer" than the foreground will be. As you can see from the image below, I start with the dark areas first.

 

 

From this vantage point of the farm you can see two gates. A common design on Martha's Vineyard is three to four horizontal boards, a middle vertical board for support if it is a wide gate, and an angled board attached to the top of the granite vertical post on the right and at the lowest part of the gate on the left. 

 

 

More Greenery

 

 

At this stage I really want to leap in to mixing warm greens to balance the cool greens. However, I know  there is plenty of the painting to go which will need the contrast. 

Before I finish for the day I painted the more warm green line in the middle of the painting. Just a touch of warmth to suggest where the greens will go next. 

 

 

Painting Greens

Near when I first started painting, I hated working with greens. They would be too vivid, too blue, too muddy. They just didn't read real to me. So, I decided to do a piece which was basically shades of green. From a yellow-green to a deep blue-green, I got to experiment. Below is the result.

 

Shades of Green

Original oil, 2001

16" X 24" 

 

After this painting greens were no longer a nemesis. Difficult, but I didn't hate them.

 

I bring this up because this next painting on my easel has a lot of different greens. They are the driving force to the depth of the piece. 

 

The interior of Martha's Vineyard, an island off the east coast,  has rolling hills and pastoral farms. Rock walls from centuries past cross the landscape. This particular farm has been a favorite of mine. 

 

 The pond in the distance adds an extra layer of depth and almost a longing to walk in to the scene to go swimming on a warm summer afternoon.

 

 

 

 

The greens on the right start to add a flavor of warm bright color to the scene. However, the deepest and richest greens are saved for the foreground.

 

 

 

 

Finished & coming up with a title

 

Title - see below

Original oil painting by Linda Besse

14" X 18"

 

Image above is a scan of the original painting

 

 

Sometimes I have a title of a painting before I start. There are paintings in which a title develops while I paint. Then, there are paintings in which the title eludes me, briefly.

 

I wanted a title which reflected a sense of place and maybe the presence of the Adele penguins. 

So many titles were rejected. Way Down South felt confusing as that is also used for the southern part of the U.S.  I considered Way Cool but it didn't resonate the way I hoped. Shortening Way Cool to Cool! wasn't right either. It wasn't cool, it was cold!

 

Ah, cold. The title?

Cold Never Bothered Me 

 

For any who have seen the Disney animated movie Frozen, the last line of the block-buster song Let It Go is the cold never bothered me anyway. While the movie Frozen takes place in the north, the "frozen continent" is Antarctica. I like this title because it is packed with meaning and though it does not specifically name the penguin species, it says everything about them.

More Ice