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.