What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Suisun City Landing, 9 x 12″
soft pastel on Wallis with watercolor underpainting
© 2009 Marianne Post

Earlier this week I blogged about heading into the studio to “resolve” a plein air study done along the slough in Suisun City. You might recall that the day was pretty cold and my study reflected the coolness of the moment. In the studio, I wanted to change the temperature of the light, to warm it up a bit and also enlarge the piece from 8 x 10″ to 12 x 16″.

notan

Pictured above is what initially came off the easel. I let it sit until the afternoon and when standing back and looking with fresh eyes, the first thing I said to myself s “what’s wrong with this?” I certainly didn’t like the bland mass of water in the foreground. I took out my notan and immediately saw (again with fresh eyes) that even at that point I was struggling with the cropping and the resolve of uninteresting shapes. I suppose my subconscious felt like it could deal with it in the painting process and my excitement to get on with the painting overpowered my left brain.

So I got out my “croppers,” pieces of L-shaped mat board to try different croppings. By eliminating a good portion of the water, more interesting shapes appear. Likewise, in cropping the sky mass, the focal point point becomes much stronger.  The light masses in the sky and water lead the eye right to the building. I should have realized in the notan stage when things weren’t going well there to take  a few extra minutes and resolve the issues at that point. After all, that is the purpose behind that whole step of my process. In the long run I could have saved time and pastel. But the learning experience, as they say, “is priceless.”