Wild Beast Studios
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Lavender Fields
December 1, 2015
— american painting, bright colors, Contemporary Artist, farmscape paintings, Fauvism. fauve artist, gay artist, knife-painting, oil pastels, paint, plein air painter, sennelier oil pastels
On November 23 2015, I started this new farmscape, sunset painting up in Kingston Illinois. Kingston is about 65 miles west of Chicago, up Route 90. It is a pleasant drive once you get past all the new highway construction and the urban sprawl of Chicago’s suburbs. Kingston is made up of many plots of farms as far as the eye can see with spiracular views of openness all around you.
This is a in studio painting in comparison to some of my others where I either start in the studio and finish up on location or vice versa. I chose to work on a stained black mahogany ground surface. I started out just blocking in the colors and general composition of the painting. From there I gradually work my way up building upon layer of colors.
This mid-point seen below you and it has a good feel to it. The sky is washed out, as the sun sets below the hillside horizon. The lavender fields have hay scattered about and in the foreground the earth has been tilled, exposing the rich raw umbers and dioxazine purples of the earth.
I continued to build up layers of the paint reaching a point where I could no longer manipulate the color since the paint was caked on so thick.
I took my carving and texturizing tools, and methodically removed much of the paint leaving behind remnants of color. I removed the thick surface of the sky, aggressively scratching it out to the point where the deep mahogany black and hitns of the fuchsia below arose to the surface. I continued to carve into the painting till the earth was scorched black exposing the ground hues.
I liked the raw painting I saw before me, and desired a more refined feel of the lavender field seen in a previous stage of this painting. I blended the sky out using white, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow dark, and cadmium orange. I loosely worked on the hillside, but mainly focused on the lavender fields in the foreground. My final touches were to get the cropped corn stalk bases painted in the fuchsia and yellowish/ orange rows.
In future paintings, I want to explore this bleached out sky with the hits of the black coming through. I have some great long and narrow surfaces to work on, and a few great bleached out sunsets that I can choose from. To see more of my progress, continue to follow my blog. To see more regular postings you can follow me on my Instagram page. Prints are available of some of my paintings as well as the originals.
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Feel free to visit my website and Instagram page at:
Instagram.com/WildBeastStudios
Gyan Samara, MFA
Wild Beast Studios 