November had been unseasonably warm until this week, when it dropped to around zero with a bit of snow. Usually I don't paint outdoors after the fall colours go away because the weather gets bad, and the scenery is drab and dreary, and it gets dark at like 4:30pm. But this year I have been trying, like last week I got out and did some work at St. Lawrence River. The lighting and scenery presents a new challenge, for one, the visual system adapts in low light, which throws off value and colour judgement. Also, colours tend to be desaturated making the mixes different. To accommodate, I made some adjustments to the palette, including bringing back phthalo green blue shade which makes great darks and cool greys with the PV19 and PV55 (pink/violet) paints. In the setup, you see some colours with two blobs- I did that so I can make desaturated versions by adding black brown or blue, while still having some preserved. Once you add a dark paint to a light paint, the light paint is 'dirty'. On location I can't clean the palette easy, so I developed this two blob approach it works well. The red blobs are two slightly different paints, PR254 ferrari red, and PR255 vermillion, both pyrole reds.
I hope to do one more large painting before the year is out, it was going to be 'Saturation Costs' but that idea is a little depressing and I may scale it down. Instead, I am intending to do another 'Where go the Fish' Somerled Edition. The original one was done some 20 years ago in Bayfield Hall London, now that my fish are healthy again I would like to do a new one, featuring our current living room which includes a prominent banana palm.
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