Thursday, 20-Feb-20 20:17:41 CET

Hollands landscape

Tonight I made two paintings at the aquarelle club! We had the dutch landscape as the theme of the evening. The first painting is from a lake in the meadows with fluffy clouds. I placed the horizon at one third from below, so I had plenty of space for the sky. This was done with a loose hand. I did not even bother to sketch on beforehand.

There is something in the painting that you cannot see. If you read more of my blogs, you can perhaps recall that I had an inkjet printer last year that died that I spent really much time to get working again. When I finally gave up, I could get a second-hand laser printer. It already had cartridges in it, and those lasted until this week. We are printing much these days. We print and sign, and then we scan and return all the time. It is contract upon contract for builders, banks, and so on. At the beginning of the evening, I had ordered a cartridge of cyan for the new laser printer. I had just finished the big clouds. Below the big clouds, there is a band with clouds that are splotched out and not really connected nicely as the big clouds. This has to do with that the company I ordered the print cartridge from called me. They asked me why I ordered an expensive cartridge when I can order cheap cartridges. The salesperson and I talked about cartridges for a while. When I came back to my painting, the clouds had dried like this. There was not much I could do to fix it.

For the forest, I had time to get it working nicely. I placed shadows here and there to match the light in the clouds and the lake. This could be a painting of a Swedish landscape, but it is supposed to be a Dutch landscape. It is actually a universal landscape.

This first painting is doing really well when viewed from a long distance. I will bring it with me to work. At work, at the end of a long corridor, I can display my paintings. This means you can see the painting when you are walking towards the painting. That can be very nice with this painting.

The next painting is a typical Dutch landscape because there are windmills in it. Obviously, it is from Kinderdijk, a famous tourist attraction I have never been to. In this painting, I worked explicitly with the wet in wet technique. The Arches paper is wonderful in spreading the pigment in the wet paper. Also, in this painting, the horizon is at one third from the bottom. You could almost see red, white blue in the painting, like the Dutch flag. How Dutch can it be? I used a mix of orange and red, and actually, from 1630 until 1662, the Dutch flag used orange instead of red. Could it be that people were inspired by the landscape when they came up with the original flag? Queen Wilhelmina issued one of the shortest decrees ever on 19 February 1937, stating that the flag of the Netherlands is red, white, and blue. End of discussion.

I painted the horizon on wet paper, and it started to flow out. The horizon line flowed out nicely. In the distance, you could think that there are city skylines, houses, trees, and all sorts of things, and it is all the creation of the paper and the pigment.

There are similar effects in the sky as well, but that is blue on blue.

All in all, a very nice evening. Outside it was raining heavily. Last weekend we had the storm Dennis, and this weekend, we will get the storm, Ellen.