The Ford

As a beginner, it was important to me to make a recognizable and believable image of whatever my subject might have been. Portraits, of course, should look like the sitter, and so on. Beginning painters like I was often slave away to not only make their picture recognizable but detailed and identical. That is, the temptation is to show the item in detail, so that many times we produce detailed but somehow stiff and lifeless pictures. We protest "but it was there!" when a mentor or colleague points out our obsessiveness, but eventually we learn to edit, suggest, indicate, and soften our edges and brush strokes. And we learn to compose and recompose.

We eventually learn to compose on the fly, rearranging the landscapes before us to become different scenes altogether. A good example is The Ford. The setting is Druid Hill Creek about a half mile north of my studio. It is a small creek, probably ten feet across and usually no more than six inches to a foot deep, flowing briskly. At this particular spot, there is a group of boulders placed by whomever maintains paths through these woods, probably truly intended as a fording place since the banks on each side upstream and down aren't very useful. This angle is one I've studied for many months, and the distant stone bridge isn't there; it's actually a concrete street culvert over the creek. The main masses in the painting are pretty much the view, but houses and electric lines fill the far distance and were edited out while painting.

"The Ford," oil on panel, 16x12

The Ford is a studio painting done from reference photos and many personal visits. Unlike many of my landscapes, this one wasn't preceded by a plein air study. I began with a burnt sienna tone, then a warm block in of the main shapes. Proceeding dark to light and top to bottom, I painted in several layers of progressive but controlled detail until it was time to stop.