Returning to Oil: On Beyond Zebra!

 If there’s anything I’ve learned from being creative, it’s that you don’t just stay here. Like in the song, you move on — beyond the photo, beyond the plot, through to something new. Something of your own! What you write is not necessarily all that is there, and what you paint is not necessarily what you see.

So! Like the Art Garfunkel song says, reality is not for me. Here is a run at carrying it on — beyond green, beyond mere representational landscape. One of the things with oils is that you can set the tone by blocking out the work with a color. Burnt sienna is the traditional hue for this, and I used it for the 1.0 version. In this 3.0 version, I used alizarin crimson.

I’ve tinkered with the proportions, losing chunks of the original photograph (which you may view once more at the bottom of this post). I also completely shed the option of green. I like the dark moody lower foreground of the work, and the sky. I waved the artist wand and lost all the slow water and greenish pond scum to insert some actual river. But, what is this with the alizarin crimson of the trees? Pinkish is what you get when you mix white, and yellow, with alizarin. It is boring. Especially over here in the upper right corner, something must be done. That something is going to involve cadmium red, which I have to go buy a tube of. Except, wow! cadmium red is $31 a tube! Maybe I will buy a cheaper red.

Is red the right direction to go? Maybe I should do a 4.0 using blue as the base color? Actually I think that -purple- would be best, and luckily if you mix ultramarine blue with cadmium red you do get purple. Mysteriously this does not happen if you mix ultramarine with alizarin — you get the murkiness in the lower left. Must work on it some more. I am going to repaint all the pinkish bit in the middle instance, and fortunately oil allows you to do that. Maybe some green will sneak in again after all. Should the undifferentiated mass of the foreground be broken up a little? Perhaps with some reflected sky? This is not done yet, folks. Hold on to your hats!