Start to Finish

I usually work from photographs. The photographs are typically ones that I have taken, but sometimes others will send me a picture that really strikes me so I ask permission to paint it. The interesting things about photographs is that they show more than the eye actually sees, so the trick for the artist is to capture what the eye might see from a photograph. One of the things that I always need to work on is allowing things to recede into the distance. Our eyes don’t see things in the distance in the same way they do in the foreground, but photographs sometimes show them with the same detail. Or the color is not as different as it is when we look at something. It has been an interesting journey to determine what to keep and what to have fade into the distance. Here is my latest from start to finish. It is a picture I took on the California coast near San Francisco. It was a misty cloudy day, so I tried to make the painting represent a bit more sun.

So the first image is the photograph, then you see the first layer or underpainting, then each successive image is how I worked through the color and what details to include and what needed to recede. In the last image you see the completed work, with my “signature” (I need to work on that). In this final version, the colors in the mid distance were “grayed” out some and the foreground is in some ways detailed and in some ways not. I tend toward impressionism.