Summer end palette cleansers

With the end of the summer in sight, I did some palette cleansing and thought about the upcoming autumn season. Usually I am in the throws of teaching and semester meetings, but being on sabbatical means I can concentrate on research all the time at work. The autumn season last year was a bit of a blur by comparison, somehow I managed to juggle everything, and make some decent autumn paintings along the way. It was a very long season, with weeks on end of blue skies. The leaves went from green to olive to brown, without producing sharp orange and red like we've seen in the past. For that we need a cold snap towards the end of September, then no rain or wind for awhile. 

Nutritional Paints, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, September 2025

Balance is key to any painting composition, visual balance that is. Making a design perfectly symmetrical is not very effective for most paintings, so one has to find other ways to create visual balance. In this small abstract I created left-leaning swirls with right-leaning cubes and waves. The eye, I mean your eye, will move around most of this design freely without getting hung up on one spot or another. Van Gogh was a master of this idea... in his Starry Night painting the eye roams around each star, the tree, the city, the mountains, and back to the stars. 

Composition Council, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, September 2025