Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts

Friday, May 5, 2017

Struggling with Green

Green Vases Flowers and Bowl, Oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm
Getting Green right in a painting and in reproduction seems to be tricky. A long time ago I remember telling my father that I thought green was the hardest colour. It went something like this:  I had been making a monoprint of my mother (bent over gardening) between the house and the barn.  It was late in the season and the grass was fading but I decided the grass should be a yellow green. My dad walked by and I was in that tormented state when nothing seems to fit with anything else in the picture. I asked him what colour he thought was the most difficult to make work.  He asked me in reply and I told him, green. 'I thought you were going to say that,' he said. In the end I reconciled the green in some way and the monoprint hangs in the bathroom, reminding me of the conversation and him. 

For some reason I challenged myself to work through colours for the month of May.  From experience I find yellow and lime green are tough to make work in any quanity in a picture so I began there.  The sketchbook page, below, works better for me than the painting above. I painted all day yesterday and in the end wiped down large areas and changed the composition.  The colour isn't quite what it is.  The green on the right is deeper.  It's quite wet after working back into it this morning, so it needs some time before I can think about it again. I came across Annie Williams on Pinterest https://www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk/artists/109-annie-williams/overview/
and had been thinking about her work as I put things together to draw.