Inspired by Green and Blue

I have been keeping an eye on this view of the green house on the pier for many years in hopes that I will get to paint it someday.  However there was no safe public area to setup to paint this view.  Luckily, this week it was accessible from one of my friend's porch; I was thrilled.


When composing this painting, I took liberty to change the size of the buildings and the pier to avoid large negative space.  The ladder was enlarged, the green house and the pier were shortened and the pillars were simplified.  As I was painting this, I realized the green color of the house was very hard to work with.  I had to change it to different shades of green multiple times to work with the surrounding.   Introducing a much darker color for one of the buildings also helped to balance the green building.  I was very happy with the end result, Thursday was a good day.

Friday was the last day for painting this week in Maine.  It arrived early.  I had done some sketches of the rocks from the ledge on Tuesday and thought it will be a good way to depart from architectural painting for a day.  I placed two big rocks first then the surrounding edges were carefully composed to bring in the negative space.  Other smaller rocks were naturally formed while painting and there were plenty of variety of rocks lying around for inspiration.


Choosing the right shape of the house took me some time.  There were many houses in sight, but to balance the busy and curvy rocks, I thought it needed the simplest house.  I ended up using the closest blue house and using windows and its colors from other houses around.  A single house seemed too quiet and lonely.  I thought of adding a fence, however a utility pole seemed more fitting and whimsical.   This painting turned out to be one of my favorite paintings from this week.  It was a great way to end a wonderful painting journey in Maine.


Here are all my work from a week of painting trip in Stonington this year.  I am already looking forward to my next trip.

Family Portrait of Houses

It was quite an interesting day for painting.  The weather forecast predicted it was going to rain.  However,  morning was very foggy then it turned into scattered light showers and strong wind.  By the late afternoon, bright sun was shining and it looked like it was another day.


I set up my easel in the morning close to my car looking at the Stonington downtown view.  It was a complex architectural structure with mansard houses and ledges.  There were many repeated structures, similar roof tops, similar style windows.  For example, the red building has at least 15 windows, thats way too many to even count.  I tried to simplify as much as possible, moving the buildings around, removing repeating windows and borrowing structures from near by buildings to vary the shapes of each building.  It was much harder to decide which structures to keep and which ones to leave out.

Egon Schiele's landscapes, specially his architecture drawings and paintings has been my inspiration for a long time.  He is a master of manipulating line and space.  His buildings are never completely closed, he always finds a way to leave open lines so that the surrounding space can flow seamlessly into the buildings.   I looked for one of his drawing  Alte Häuser in Krumau, 1914 which helped me quite a bit today to simplify my drawing.  Using the same inspiration, I decided to use the same color for all the buildings to avoid blocks of multiple colors.   However, there was a need to introduce another color to counteract with many horizontal white shapes, so I decided to paint the vertical right hand side building to a darker blue shape.  I kept my color palette limited with just enough variation to keep the painting interesting.

Greenhead in the fog

There was a dense fog Tuesday morning.   I went back to my favorite ledge.  After drawing a few sketches, I decided to paint the same pier from last year since its the only thing I could see clearly in the fog.

Lobster co-op in Stonington

I am very excited to be back in Stonington to paint for a week.   It is always a challenge at the beginning of the week, for one can easily get distracted from picturesque sceneries in every corner.  On the first day, I decided to go back to a familiar lobster co-op building which I have painted a few times over the years.  Since every painting of this building in the past has been an iconic painting, I wanted to change the composition this time.  Therefore,  I decided to introduce other surrounding elements into the composition.



The pier is fascinating to me, since the pillars underneath and the light that comes from behind create an abstract space.  I extended the rocky wall in the foreground to get away from the past iconic composition.   However, it became the most problematic area as I did not wanted it to be another vertical band just like the pier.  It ended up becoming a L shaped wall leaving some space between it and the pier.  At the end of the day, I was pretty happy with the painting.  There are a few minor changes necessary to bring it close to complete but that is for another day.