FIRST LANDSCAPE _ FINISHED

 

FIRST LANDSCAPE ... Enter the Train

I'm really enjoying the freedom of landscape painting: no need for 'deadly accuracy'. I'm used to spending over a hundred hours of exactness on my larger Pen & Ink. Also portraiture calls for exact likeness.

Although the train calls for Pen & Ink accuracy, it's not too demanding.

aide-mémoire: The canvas is 70 x 50 cms (27.5 x 20 inches approx) 

 

FIRST LANDSCAPE 2

A quick update. Just starting to draw the train in pencil at the bottom.

MY FIRST EVER LANDSCAPE

I have never painted landscapes before but focused mostly on portraits and still life.

The Mountain Landscape Painting I’m starting, has happened by chance. I was looking for a great photo of a steam train to paint … I found one. Now the one I found had no information with it, so I searched for a matching photo with text. I found many similar but not the same.

I turned to videos and found what looked like a match and so I played it. It was an exact fit. The video starts a little roughly, but it turned out to be so good that I sat mesmerized from start to finish. It’s well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ww0_-j1CJc

Just to round off the story, my daughter Louise is married to Carl who hails from Colorado (originally from Chicago). He has travelled on this train and took his sons when they were boys!

Durango & Silverton Railroad, Colorado
Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
(27 x 20 inches)

Believe it or not, this is a Railway Train (Railroad Locomotive) painting.

Zephyrinus can you email me please, I lost your contact details in a computer mix-up.

SSSSsssteam Heat!

What a battle, that smoke and steam have given me....

At last this painting is finished, it's about 70% of where I was trying to get to. The strange lighting in the reference photograph works because we know it is a photograph. Trying to replicate it on a large canvas, with my limited abilities, moved from too bright to too dark via a canvas of  mud.

To finish it off I've got flash reflection off the front of the engine - makes it look much too light. I'm really going to take photography more seriously.

 Having said all that, it has really got me back into painting: I could feel the brush beginning to take over instead of me pushing it stiffly about.

I feel I have moved a little closer to rehabilitation after a two year break.

Trying to Stage a Comeback

 Hope you read this David Z.

I'm trying to get back into art after two + traumatic years. I started by reviewing my records:

I have a registry of my paintings which I was updating today and noticed that number 61 was blank. It drove me mad searching for which painting No 61could be. Then I remembered that I have this blog, and there it was: No 61’Vintage Steam Train’ Dec 2016. ……… It is unfinished!!

 

So why is an unfinished work registered as 61? Because I am a Virgo and need my art registered in date sequence so I can assess my progress.  

 

So why is it unfinished? Because life is short and I’m always champing-at-the-bit to get on with loads of other exciting projects … and I knew I could get back to all that smoke and steam later. The train was the exciting bit, the steam less so.

 

It’s a big canvas 80 x 60 cms (32 x 24 inches) …. I’ll have to finish now. 

Hi

 My wife was very ill for two years, and I nursed her day and night.

She died on the 3rd November 2021. We had been married 62 years.

Not sure where life goes from here.