Revisiting a Painting

Earlier this fall, my husband and I traveled over to the far Northeast corner of Oregon. We stayed a couple of nights, one in Enterprise and the other in Joseph. The Wallowa Mountains are really grand and offer wonderful artistic inspiration.

 

 

Unfortunately, my plein air attempt at capturing this beautiful country fell short of wonderful. Earlier this week, I pulled the painting out of my travel folder and took it to the sink. I washed off all the pigment I could, but as always, a ghost of the old painting remained. I worked on it, trying to convey from my memories, the feeling of the mountains, valleys, and trees. This is what I had midweek.

 

I decided that the mountains were lost, never to be revived into a shape or formation I could like. Also there was too much water. So I took this full sheet-22x30 and cropped off both the top and bottom. I then saturated the back with water and stapled the remaining painting onto a stretcher board.

I felt that the dark evergreen trees had become muddy and dark, so I decided to use some gouache to give the trees new life. Here is the beginning of the revival, so you can see the dark and muddy to the left, the added gouache to the right.

 

After having the fun of using gouache to cover some of the original mistakes I'd made with the transparent watercolor, I had a pretty nice traditional landscape. The next question is how best to crop and frame it, to show off it's strongest points. Mike likes the square/slightly verticle, showing some of the mountains.

 

Wallowas, 22x18(verticle)

And here is the more traditional horizontal landscape.

 

Wallowas 18 x 22(horizontal)

Which grabs you as the stronger painting? Please let me know!

And not to be wasteful, I took the sky and water strips and washed off most of the paint. I then took my new stamp, painted watercolor onto it with a brush, and created some new textured paper for upcoming collages.

 

Stamp with paint on it.

 

Strips of newly patterned paper for future collage work.