Thursday, January 14, 2016

October in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire

The White Mountains of New Hampshire in early October are beautiful.  I attended a plein air workshop with the American Artist, Stapleton Kearns in Sugar Hill, NH a few years ago.  This painting represents a memory of the late afternoon light effects on the muted landscape colors.

1 comment:

Curtis Faville said...

Is it then a new work, or one you did "a few years ago"?

I very much like the piercing spatial clarity of the branches against the sky. That feels very real, and since I know you strive for verisimilitude, that's a big accomplishment.

The fore-ground, however, once again begs the question of over-all structural tension. Your placement of the easel, in relation to the scene you chose to depict, seems to draw tension out of the composition. If there's no fore-ground, at least none of much interest, why not crop up to the ground closer to the tree? It's as if you felt constrained by being too far away from the matter that interested you, and just filled in the fore-ground as an afterthought.

This is a problem I have often with photography. I'll see something in the distance that moves me, but I
may have "no foreground"--at least nothing to justify including it. I need to find the right lens-length to get what I want without making it seem "faraway."

I think it's a matter of emphasis: Your depiction of the tree and the sky is so effective, we don't want to be distracted by anything of less consequence.

The branches show the same skill you did in your painting of the little girl at the piano. You've gotten control of movement and twisting and bent structure (which I also noticed in the man painting in Artist at Work).

Exclude stuff that doesn't contribute to the central thrust of the vision.