Stream Down by the Barn

Stream by the Barn Underpainting

Another snowscape!?   But see?  There is melting going on here ... a sign of inevitable Spring. :)

The barn in this painting is located in Lee, MA next to the Devonfield Inn.   I was picturing how the barn may have looked when it was originally built.   It was probably red oxide (the cheapest and most available paint back then), certainly not white.    The mid-winter setting and frozen stream probably didn't look much different though - pristine!

The modernized barn was white so that was the way I painted it.  The strong dark shadow from the eaves was perfectly parallel with the roof line - all was well with the world.   I loved that there was a stark contrast of values in the scene.    Whether viewed sideways or up-side-down, the abstract value pattern worked - independent of the subject.



Stream by the Barn

The stream in the foreground was done with a very dark combination of transparent darks: alizarin, ultramarine, transparent oxide brown, viridian and purple.  I didn't mix them thoroughly, but rather scraped up a bit of each onto my palette knife and spread it horizontally, which resulted in a dark area where the various colors can still be distinguished.   If I had mixed all those darks, it would have resulted in a nice dark blackish color which would have been okay.  A better result came from minimal mixing of the colors, adding another dimension to the darkest dark.

Let the melting begin!