Painting of Epic Proportions

I have been itching to start a large painting.   Within the last few months, I have painted dozens of canvases, mostly small except for two paintings that were 24"x36.”  The same day I visited the Gardner Museum for its re-opening, I swung up the street and drove by the Boston Dick Blick store, the proverbial candy shop for artists of all kinds.  I told myself that if I could get a parking spot at a meter, I would stop.   As I turned the corner from the Fenway onto Boylston, a car pulled out right in front of me and directly across the street from the Blick Store entrance.  It was meant to be.

Among the items I purchased were two 30x48 inch canvases...wow.   They are 1 3/8 inches deep, triple gesso, on medium weight canvas.   I don’t know if these “heavy duty” parameters matter much, but it sure is exciting to think that they might.   It is probably analogous to the woodworker who goes for the 6x6 post instead of the 4x4 post.  Heavy duty feels better - special.

One week later and the canvases are shouting out to me.   Big canvases mean big decisions, bigger chunks of time and commitment.  Painters are encouraged to create a body of work that has a theme or a recognizable style.   I am just not interested in producing the same subject over and over.  I produced the cranberry series, which was fun and successful, but I'm done with that for now.   I hope that my thick, bumpy trademark texture is recognizable style enough.  Hmmm...what to paint?? 

Finally I decide to start a winterscape since we finally have snow cover after an unseasonably mild November, December and January.      I looked through an old picture folder from a trip to beautiful Newfane, Vermont a couple of years ago.   I found four beautiful shots that my husband took.   The compositions are all are exceptional without any cropping, but I need to convert these images to the dimensions of these 30x48 inch canvases.  

If you want to be bored, continue reading this paragraph.   If a golden rectangle interests you, look it up online and continue with the paragraph.  Thirty by forty-eight inches are Golden Rectangles so I open a Golden Rectangle converter tool on the web.  I use the pixel counts in my picture editor to crop the pictures proportionate to the Golden Rectangle and hopefully creating an exciting design.  As I sized the images, it looked like the four pictures really comprised two very nice complimentary pairs.   I would paint both canvases at the same time.   Wow.  Twenty square feet of blank canvas.  

I used the photos to rough in the compositions.   The left canvas is a morning photo of me walking up Mount Putney.   The snow was so brilliant under a soft yellow and pink winter sun.    The right hand canvas is the Newfane common in front of the columned courthouse late in the afternoon.  The shadows are much deeper and the sky much cooler and bluer.  

This is a project of epic proportion for me.   I am forced to use a step stool to comfortably work the tops of the canvases. Meanwhile, over the past few days a the snowy scene that I had planned on using outside my slider for my value and color reference, is gone.   I continue to work on the structural elements to keep the project moving forward.   I look forward to snow to get a real color reference scheme.   Stay tuned...this will take a while.