July Late Afternoon on The Credit River
The joy of painting studio work is that you have time to think and take your work through iterations. This 16"x20" is no exception. This summer I am enjoying painting the Credit River that snakes through Mississauga, my home town. Judging by the gorge that the river runs through, The Credit must have been a mighty river some time ago. The hills surrounding the river bed tell of a time when the waters were much higher and, one would assume much more treacherous. Today the river meanders through the gorge at a pleasant pace and has a nice summer feeling to it.
I went out to the river a few weeks ago determined to take several reference photos from which I hoped to work in the studio. Our summer has been rainy and cold, and I wanted to have options on drab and rainy weekends. I took several shots of interesting spots and have since revisited them at different times of the day to take note of colour changes. I gave up on taking my camera with me for these extra learning trips because I believe that the camera is incapable of rendering the subtle colours as my eyes see them. I therefore settled for notes instead.
This painting started - innocently enough - as a rendering of the mid-day image I had captured on my first trip. I was fascinated by the light colour of the forward tree and felt that there was a good subject there. I blocked in the trees and started working on the focal point, but somehow, it was not a satisfactory outcome. I am sure I could have kept going with it, but somehow the colour of the under painting kept calling me back to it. I really liked the warmth of it and I wanted this painting to reflect a warm summer day.I went back to the location on a late warm evening and the colours that I saw struck me deeply. THAT is what I wanted. I noted the colours in mind and went back home. For the next two weekends I worked on this painting when I could not go out to do plein air work. The colours went back and forth and eventually I settled on the look that I liked.
In the final version, I took down the treeline and fixed the island and the river bank. The colours are very subtle so it is hard to see them in a picture. I tired to get them as close as possible to the true painting, but the subtle changes are averaged in the photo unfortunately. As you can see, what I ended up with has almost nothing to do with the reference. The painting is inspired by the scene, but it is a work of art not a report. It takes a life of its own. The goal is not to have someone say: "Oh i know where that is. I have been there before." I want it to convey a mood, a feeling of a warm summer afternoon. If that comes through. The painting works :)
July Late Afternoon on The Credit River, 16"x20", Oil on canvas.
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