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Sunday, April 22, 2007

New Hampshire Workshop - Continues!

We had another beautiful day in Goffstown. (It's really making up for the Nor'easter and the floods.) Yesterday, we headed out to a small farm nearby that had plenty of barns and donkeys. The spring sunshine is so strong that, toward midday, the landscape washes out into dull browns and greens. The light also appears quite cool. I wanted to offset this with some good barn color. So, my demonstrations focused on the cool sunlight and how shadows can appear quite warm under these circumstances. One oil demo (below, 5x8) shows some of this.

Below this demo is a pastel (5x7) from the day before, at the Dunbarton cemetery, where something similar is going on. The underside of the large tree branch is quite warm; the shadow it casts on the tree trunk is cool with bits of blue, thanks to the skylight reflecting into it. (You will note that the sunlit trunk itself is quite warm. Nature is full of such complex contradictions. Annoying, but it also enriches the painting experience!)