Friday, 25-May-18 21:11:47 CEST

Outdoor paintings at Sunnerås 19 and 25 of May 2018

The holiday at Sunnerås in May is long over now. I started writing this in June when I was back in the Netherlands. I painted three paintings in total! That is thee more than I usually manage to paint. For many years I have been saying to myself and my wife that if I don't make a painting, then it is not a real holiday. That is a harsh thing to say, but it is as if I have ignored this myself.

The weather was fantastic! That helps of course. Almost every morning the sun was greeting us from dawn till dusk.

The previous painting on 13 of May was of the workplace house. On May 19 I decided to make a picture of the chicken shed. By doing so the theme of the paintings this holiday became houses at the farm of Sunnerås. That chicken shed is in a miserable condition. It would need that I fastened planks on it and painted it, but I liked it in its state of misery. There are always things to improve at this farm and as I said there are good reasons for that I have not been painting so much when on holidays and that is that there are always important things to do.

To make things more complicated, I decided to make a time-lapse movie of the painting of the chicken shed. I decided to create a straightforward time-lapse, but of course, you need a little introduction to the movie is. To do that I film myself, mumbling into the camera, etc. I managed to make one take that was short and concise, but the wind was chasing around the microphone giving a rumble in the background.

Then I sat down and had a wonderful time painting the chicken shed. I had decided to sit in the shadow of the workshop house behind me. As the sun progressed the shadow of the roof started covering my canvas, so that was less good. To cope with the shadow, I had to reposition the easel a couple of times.

It was fun, and the painting was beautiful. Just as in the first painting I was again overwhelmed by the challenge of mixing greens with my reduced palette. I am using titanium white, burnt sienna, pyrrole red, ultramarine en permanent yellow lemon. For the basis green, I mix ultramarine and yellow. But then I mix it with red and white and burnt sienna to get all sorts of flavors of green.

The trees, shrubs and the bushes require their painting strategy. I had not figured out what that strategy would be. Later I found a youtube movie from an artist that explained that mainly with oil painting you work from dark to light. So you build up with the dark greens first and especially in the background. I suppose that is when you work with drying layers that is the way to go. I often work when the layers are still wet. Even so, it is probably better to paint the dark greens first and then fill in with lighter greens on top. There are a lot of aspects to learn about this, and that is lovely because then I can continue to spend a lot of time doing it. It should not be too easy because then it is no challenge doing paintings.

A couple of days later on 25 of May, I made my third painting. This time it was the milk house. When the farm was active, by the previous owners, they used to sell milk from their cows. They placed the milk in large stainless steel containers in that little milk house. Then there was a pickup driving through the different farms in the village that picked up the milk and distributed it further. It is a lovely little house, and it is not in such bad condition. That said, when I sat there painting, I noticed that the lowest row of roof tiles are pointing down slightly more than they should so there is something with the roof that I will need to look into at some time.

For the third time, I struggled with the greens. At this time I started to get used to it. I think it was a feeling of just going out and capture the world around me as it is, that was the mindset I had when made these paintings. I did not want to make beautiful pictures in itself but record what I was seeing and having a great time. That was all, and it worked out well.