Bolton is a sprawling suburban town north of Toronto that is surrounded by farmland. Just across Columbia way a vast cornfield goes as far as the eye can see. Housing developers would love to get their hands on this land, but so far a relative truce in the form of a green belt has kept them at bay. Speaking of green, with all the rain the corn was a very intense shade of green that was difficult to capture. I made an under-painting of green/chartreuse fading to the foreground to give a sort of artificial glow, then over laid it with a variety of green brush strokes to give it a palpable sense of movement.
Corn Field horizontal, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, July 2023 (No. 3621a)
This was the first attempt, where I worked out some of the colours and techniques that would lead to the larger version shown above. It struck me that impressionist painters, even van Gogh who painted corn fields on occasion did not produce such a bright green. Part of it is technology, the phthalocyanine green was only brought to market in the mid twentieth century. It comes in two shades, a blue shade and a yellow shade. The names are an exaggeration since they are both blue-leaning green hues, although the yellow version (PG36) is pretty close to a visually exact green. I mostly learned that from reading MacEvoy's Handprint.com.
Corn Field vertical, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, July 2023 (No. 3520b)
No comments:
Post a Comment