The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. - John Muir

This is the current phase of my landscape, what you see right now is almost all light blue and dark blue with some white in the sky!

I love Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s art, especially his trees, they are so lush and puffy and after watching countless Bob Ross shows over the years I think I can paint something similar. I also love the harsh surrealism of Salvador Dali (I know, everyone loves Dali!) and while I’m not going to consciously try to do something similar, I do want to add that feeling of dreamlike strangeness if I can.

First of all I blocked in the foreground with india ink mixed with (clear) acrylic medium (as you can get a variety of shades of dark greys this way rather than just black). I wanted to have a nice contrast to start with. I also like to have a pile of gold coins around when I paint to invoke the spirit of Raphael! (they are just those new US one dollar coins not real gold!)

After the acrylic/India ink dried (pretty quickly in this warm weather), I added a thin layer of white oil paint over the white areas and painted an inch or two over the dark areas too.

I see the sun low on the horizon every morning through the trees when I take a walk down to the beach so I remember that the sky is darker at the top. I know I could take a photograph and work from it but it’s so much easier to ’see’ it in my mind than to rely on my eyes, even though I have excellent eyesight which helps when you put the finishing details in.  At this point I have an idea where the sun is in the painting and where the light will cast the highlights and where the shadows should approximately be.

Then I started to paint in the sky, I roughly mixed white with cerulean blue (a light blue) and smacked the brush on the canvas to make a nice texture that has pure white, pure cerulean blue and a mixture of the two. I started to place the texture in a direction that suggested where the sun was coming from, sort of in a subtle van Gogh way.

I then added a darker blue, Prussian blue that is (all oil paints now mixed with drying compounds, as I don’t want to wait six months for this to dry!!!). Now I worked on getting the shadows and then highlights and then shadows etc, it took several hours to get to the current stage. You can see how the tree at the front is becoming strange, more Dali than Fragonard and to interpolate Devo interpolating Jimi Hendrix, it’s not not necessarily beautiful but mutated! hehe!

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name.
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! where s’e'er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
-   Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678, The Garden

Originally posted 2008-06-11 16:40:05. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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