I am assuming the last crop is the latest development, and just wanted to say it is a good one and basically for a simple and sound compositional reason.
Color is very much like the parts of a piece of music. It will pull all the parts together as a cohesive whole, or create chaos.
Walk into a choral room with 30 voices all singing their own songs at the top of their lungs and you have a major noise/mess on your hands.
Begin to give a melody line to one group....and have the others augment with harmonies that weave WITH that melody, and you bring control.
If the lyrics and mood are the point with which to emit to the listening audience, this cohesive unity with melody and harmony works to highlight and underscore the theme intended and the audience gets it. Chaos hides the intent.
The painter responds to a thing...and the novice to become an intermediate, and then a master must understand and prioritize the moment. There is a reason you respond, and it will take many failed paintings to get a handle on yourself and the why's? of your choices. This is one reason I often say around here that it takes 120 bad paintings done and put behind you to learn something about painting.
The novice is moved emotionally to set up to paint, moved by few essential elements but quickly observes many other intricasies of the scene and thinks it clever to prove their keen observation adding unnecessary clutter.
It must be understood that at every spot to stand and observe a scene and potential painting, that no less than a half-dozen paintings alone could be done with each one being different in their emphasis and dynamics. ONe must anticipate one's tendency to try and paint 3 paintings in one...and resist. You must get at the barebones rudimentary reasons you responded to a thing.
Like Michelangelo, you chip out the life that is inherent in the stone, or this case the scene. I call those few essentials that nails the life and beauty you thirst and require the "ah-Hah!" which is the response when you indeed put it down to paint. Nothing more is needed, nothing less could have done it.
In your original work...the blues of the sky are absolutely totally unrelated to the overall scene.
Color theory wise...the blues are a contrasting dynamic which makes the oranges and reds of your scene stronger, and the artistic inclination is to take advantage of that..but, the harmony of the moment requires greater prudence.
Should your response to the moment been related to those sky blues as essential, your job as musical score director would have been to bring the visual voices together in harmony. To do so, you would have to establish color rhythm or notation.
This is achieved by sharing or distributing your color throughout. The way you bring 2 or 3 paintings in one together is to take that which is common in each and share or spread it throughout into the others.
If you have color notes of blue in the sky, you'll need to find cause to paint spots of blue in the midground and foreground. Reds and oranges in the foreground need to find cause to be shared and distributed into the sky.
Your latest crop in eliminating the
distraction of the sky blues allows the natural existence of the harmonies already established to sing their melody with appropriate harmonies in tact.
I hope that helps to underscore why this now works so well. Nicely finished!
Larry
Linear Mode
