This painting has turned into quite a big project, I've probably not had to work on anything so intensively since 'Desiderata' near the beginning of the residency. As with most of my work of late it has been more about the paint than the subject matter, although I an constantly trying to alley the two things. Once again I am working with the same palette as previously but now I'm back to working with the brush and the brushstrokes really matter, Because of this the painting is being built up layer by layer to achieve both the colours and the textures of the paint that I am looking for.

Most of the painting only exists as under-painting at the moment, but the very 'flat looking trees have had their second layer to give them texture; this won't really come to life until the top layer, in this case the highlight, is added. Whilst the trees have been drying today I have been working on the background area, or snow-field, between the trees. This is the only area so far that is reaching completion. It has now had a third layer of white 'tints' which has given it most of its colour and texture; it may just need a quick re-visitation at the end to add any final details that I deem necessary.

Just a quick update on my current work in progress; which is going by the the working title  'Complementary Tree'. This is the largest painting that I have worked on for a while and certainly during isolation so it isgoing to take somewhat longer than the pieces I've been working on recently.

As I mentioned a few days ago I've become very aware of the understandable relationships between the work I was doing in the States last year and what has been  happening with my colour theory experiments here this year. This is the first painting to explore these relationships, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

 This piece has become a companion to the previous one. A;though it is off my easel now I still feel I need time to consider it more. Having said all of that there are some marks I really love more in this piece.

So 'On my easel' has lead to another completed painting, but you may have noticed that I've had 2 OMEs concurrently without a completed painting in between.  The answer to this is very easy, I actually have 3 working easels in my studio at any one time with potentially half a dozen pieces on and off them at different times of the day. It isn't often that I come to a point when I am considering having more than one painting reaching completion at the the same time but these two pieces are part of the same experiment so realistically it shouldn't be a total surprise that this has happened. I may even put these two pieces out as a pair of a diptych. 

My last post was a photograph of a tree on the coast here in glorious Autumn colour set off by an intensely contrasting blue sky. It was a photograph taken just the other day on one of my rare forays out of the house for supplies. When I posted it I thought of it as just a wonderful photograph and a great example of complementary  colours; but the image has stayed in my mind since then and I have realised that it reminds me of a painting I was working on of trees last winter in the snowy mountains of West Virginia.

Once again one of the big inspirations for this painting are those complementary colours, the yellow and the purple, the orange and the blue; even the black and white. This is one of a series of paintings that I have been working on in the States, they are my main body of work out there. However since my return and enforced lockdown in the UK the Self Isolation Residency has lead my work off into different, new but never unconnected fields.

Now that I am confronted  with the similarity of these images I begin to realise that the colour pallet of my Near Black series has come full circle via landscape of Scotland back to landscapes of the States.