Now what could this be?
What do reckon this is? Before you answer - here's another question. Have you ever seen a painting in a book or on your screen and thought how good it was only to be disappointed when you see the real thing? I'm sure we all have but what about the other way round. Could it be detrimental to a painting to not see the original? I use the internet a lot to showcase my work and I have no issues with the quality of the images I upload to my website, Facebook etc, etc. However for me there is no substitute for seeing the original close up and personal. I would like to illustrate this by using one of my paintings. I am not going to show you which one until the end. One of the drawbacks of not seeing a painting in real life is that a lot of the details can be easily overlooked. If you only see a digital image of a painting on your laptop or mobile device it is very difficult to grasp the scale or context of the piece. The size of a painting is very important because it is chosen by the artist so he or she can fully accommodate the ideas that have inspired in the first place. This particular painting is 30" x 22" and with a 3" mount and 1" frame width it takes up a sizeable chunk of any wall. Here's another bit....
What do you reckon...a flower of some sort? This will help:
Once the flower is seen in context it is much easier for the mind to process. These are buttercups. I drew them and added masking fluid before painting over them. When the painting was absolutely dry I removed the mask and painted the flowers - winsor yellow for the petals with a tiny drop of winsor red in the centre while still wet. So here's your next one:
Right - obviously a hedgerow. It's meant to be hawthorn painted quickly with reds blues and yellows mixing together wet and wet and then darker branches and leaves painted in after the first wash was dry. Let's move upwards a bit....
So here's the top branch of the hawthorn hedge and now we see some details of the landscape. This could only be the glorious Yorkshire Wolds with its undulating contours, large fields, big sky and characteristic yellow oilseed rape fields in the background. Here's another feature:
It's an old chapel but clearly abandoned and derelict so let's see how it sits in the landscape:
Once it's surrounded by trees it looks even more lonely and sad. But this is not a sad painting. On the contrary I was inspired by the exuberance of spring life all around me - the lush greens, the cheerful flowers and the singing birds - a celebration of riotous renewal. I hope you have enjoyed looking at some details from my painting and if you have got this far then I reckon you deserve to see the full monty....so here it is...
So the strange looking object at the start turned out to be a fence post. Did you guess right? I hope you have enjoyed looking at these little details and that they have added to your enjoyment of the whole painting. Anyway one last little test before I leave. Can you find another symbol of new life and renewal in the painting? Let me know if you do. Glenn
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