Loosely Painted Landscape

Decided to paint today. Started late – only a couple of hours of daylight left – so thought I would just get on with it. In fact something told me that today was going to be a different sort of painting day. So I got the easel out, some paints and brushes, then filled some jars with water.

Square canvas. As for subject: I hadn’t really thought about it. I have a selection of photos and sketches of landscapes which I take regularly when out walking or cycling – mostly fields, low hills and riverside scenes in late winter. In the end I just picked one of them at random and worked straight from it.

To start with I drew a few loose lines across the canvas in charcoal to mark out rough boundaries, but could already notice myself thinking too much about it. So instead I forgot about colours, composition, the ‘correct’ brush to use or any sort of pre-arranged ‘design’ and just grabbed whatever tube of paint seemed nearest – which happened to be Hookers Green. No thought to careful quantities, I just mixed the paints, and then whatever looked like an interesting colour on the palette would end up on the canvas.

It’s good to paint like this for a change: good not to worry about results. In the end I actually quite like the result…but the main object of today was just to paint freely and loosely. It probably helped that the light was running out – no time to think. And choosing colours randomly instead of planning them brought out a few interesting results, especially when I didn’t always clean the brushes properly between application, letting the old colour bleed into the new.

Here’s a list of what I used:

Titanium White, Hookers Green, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine, Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, Lemon Yellow and Raw Umber.