This picture has been a long time in the making, and having finally finished it, I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it.
It’s certainly big – at 48″ x 36″ or 1.2m x 90cm it’s the largest painting I’ve completed to date. It’s also very complex – lots of perspectives to get right, and plenty of shadows and lights.
I started blocking in the sky on this all the way back in February, having chosen this image as the next subject for my lessons with Peter Delahenty following on from my Cottage at Rougham painting. Then along came COVID-19 and mandatory lock-downs, during which time I left the picture aside waiting for my lessons to resume. Over two weeks in June I finally had the chance to work with Peter again, but then along came the far deadlier second wave of the virus to hit Victoria, and once again we were back in lock-down.
With no clear end in sight, I decided that this time around I would continue the momentum I had already built up and work on it myself – and so each morning before starting work I would use the time I’d normally spend commuting to finish off a little bit more. Finally, in early August I have reached a point where the picture is essentially finished.
I say essentially, because to me it doesn’t seem quite there yet, but there’s not really much more I feel I can do with my current level of expertise. Overall I’m happy with the picture, but I don’t feel ecstatic about it like I thought I would.
It sort of hovers somewhere between impressionism and realism, which could be part of the problem, but I think the main thing is it is a painting of a photograph I took during our 2019 cruise through the south of France at a place that I absolutely fell in love with – the village of Viviers. I took the photograph at 6:00 am while the rest of the ship slept, standing at the edge of a field of sunflowers and watching as a gorgeous red glow slowly drifted across the hilltop village. To me the picture doesn’t quite capture that just yet.
Perhaps once all of this lock-down is over, I’ll get a chance to work it out with Peter, and I might finally get something approximating the masterpiece I was after when I started back in February.
August 2020
Oil on 48″ x 36″ stretched canvas.
