New Abstract Landscape Painting

Here are the first few steps in the first week of work on a new landscape painting. I’ve worked with only 4 mixed acrylic colors, a dark but transparent violet, a deep but transparent crimson red, a transparent tint of cobalt blue, and a deep but transparent emerald green. All of these colors have been painted into a very wet surface, and often I used a wet brush to go over edges of painted areas.

I must emphasize that this painting is experimental. It is very different from any artwork I’ve made in the past. I have made landscapes but none that weren’t based in realism. While I have worked with many different techniques over the years, oils - graphite and pencils, watercolor, acrylics, mixed media distressed painting, graphics and computer graphics – these have always contained realistic images even when abstracting and/or also containing nonobjective passages. Instead, this painting is to be made up completely of abstracted washes and opaque passages of acrylic paint.

If this landscape works the way I want it to, I will create a new body of work based on it. If it does not, I will not pursue the technique any further. I’m hoping that upon completion - in addition to the obvious color transparencies and abstracted nature of the work - there will be an abstruse spiritual quality that projects to most viewers. There will only be one way to find out if that is so. I will have to make a questionnaire and poll viewers.

Finished Mixed Media Distressed Christmas Card Painting

The 10” x 10” mixed media distressed painting has gone through 6 stages with about 6 layers in each. While not completely satisfied with the painting, I’m done. However, this is not the final image for the Christmas Card. In order to make the 5 x 7 image I will have to crop out some of the various components in the painting. That will necessitate making copies of the various components so they can be pasted back into the 5 x 7 inch image using photo shop. That will not be as easy as it sounds. I will have to move things around, and possibly change the size and attitude of some elements until the entire composition comes together. I will make a comparison of the mixed media distressed painting and the card image on this blog when the card is ready to go to the printer so the viewer can see the differences between the two.