making little improvements

A good friend and fellow painter, Carl Bretzky, came in from Minnesota to escape the winter cold and paint in shorts. When Carl asked me what he should bring with him I said all you need is a tube of green and a tube of brown and maybe some white. As it turned out I needed to paint some Florida stuff for my galleries here anyol'who, so we wandered about for 3 days painting the areas. I think it's fun to have artists from other exotic states come here to paint so they can experience what it is that I'm always bitching about. Flat, hot, mosquitos, no distance and two colors. We went to the beach, a local park and the cup of grace was a boat trip up the Wekiva river with our happy captain Franko. And let me just say for the record, if you haven't taken a canoe, kayak or other boat down the Wekiva here in central Florida, you should. It is the real thing. You do need a guide for a motor boat because of all the submerged trees but any canoe will do.

The 20x20 above was from that little 3 hour tour. Myself, Carl, Don Sondag, Stacy Barter and Lynn Whipple, an all star cast, packed into a 17 foot walkabout and landed at the only place for miles where we could be assured of no snakes, alligators or chupicabras. Anyway, I liked the painting okay, it just needed more.... something. Sometimes you just can't get everything done you want to do in a couple of hours. Don says never rework them... so does John Burton, for that matter, but this painting is going to a gallery and needed a bit o' polish.

I think I improved it without overworking. Mostly my time was spent adjusting shapes and edges with a few color shifts. It felt a bit dark in the foreground so I lightened that and fussed with the shape of the path because it seemed too similar to the shape of the creek. I pushed the distant trees back by blueing up the shadows and threw a little more light in the grays of trees. More detail in the palms in the foreground too. and a little more variety in the greens in light, warming here and cooling there.

Now on to the other two 20x20s and a not so good 30x30 that just came back after two years in storage at a gallery. Busy busy.