Colour, Posts, and Contour Lines

I often discuss colour on my posts, but how about discussing a painting of posts in a field of colour? While you are thinking about that, I'll just say that this was a little doodle in one of my many note books which was strong enough to be a whole painting on it's own. The fairly minimal detail makes it a little easier to look at than some of my other abstracts, and also allowed me as the artist to concentrate on the aesthetics of the painting without the burden of externious details. Anyways,  I like painting open spaces, all of my abstracts contain at least a little open space in them.
I suppose the style here is kind of like Salvador Dali meets Jimi Hendrix?

In a recent blog I talked about outlines and how they can contribute to the energy and style of a painting, not to mention the composition... in this examplea lot of the depth you feel comes from the contour lines of the land. The other way to create depth of course is to put warm bright colours in the foreground (red and yellow down by the signature) and cool colours in the background (greens blues and purply-brown at the back).

I got the idea for these kind of lines from a trick that the impressionists (and the group of seven) used a lot... directional brushstrokes. They arranged groups of bold brushstrokes to build up volume in their work, usually for trees, clouds, fields etc. In watercolour it is nearly impossible to show brushstrokes cleanly because it is a liquid medium, so instead I developed these curvy lines, which do a similar thing as the directional brushstrokes used by the likes of Cezanne, Monet, Tom Thompson...
another example where I used this was in 'Ground Escape'.

5x7" cold press, winter 2013