Here’s No. 65. Just a single pear this time and I used some of the new blue background fabric to mix up the back a little bit. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve done three of these in a row or what but this one felt so right. It’s exactly the way I want to paint but wrangling it sometimes seems impossible. I guess that is what practice is for. If you hit the right note enough times you start to learn where it is. This is the last of the pears for a while. I’ve got a few more landscapes coming up.
Month: November 2010
- November 8, 2010
For number 64 I tried to do a little more with the composition and make it more dynamic. The original idea had the pears ganging up on the apple but once I got it on the canvas it looked more like the apple is bossing them around. For some reason too the brushwork was a lot more loose too and this one was especially fun to paint.
- November 7, 2010
Another exploration of the pears here. This time I used two instead of three. I tried to slow down a bit on these and get more of the texture and variations instead of using such large patches of color. It’s almost abstract if you look close but by squinting you can see right where the light is.
- November 6, 2010
After a few days of nothing but landscapes it’s back to the fruit. We are going way back to the first four paintings of the year too with pears. I was really tired of painting apples so I headed over to Publix and grabbed a few nice looking green ones. Honestly, I thought with as many apples as I had done that these would be like falling off a log but it took a little more effort. The colors, textures and behavior of the pears are really different and it took some work and experimenting with the colors to make it right.
It’s the red to green transition that is maddening. Red and green are not meant to blend – you get gray in nature but somehow pears work. I just put the red where it was meant to go and the green where it was and used a yellow ocher to help the two play together.
- November 5, 2010
No. 61 is another one from Chattanooga. This time we are under the Walnut Street Bridge. There is a huge expanse of grass that leads right out to the Tennessee River and people are always hanging out and having picnics there.
This painting was extremely difficult starting out. The bridge itself is a lattice work of metal and rivets. There is no way to “paint it” so I had to let it loose a little it and just see what happened. This one too was the first where I went back and worked on it some more since Number 36. If I was not going to be able to get a realistic view of it I thought I would at least have some fun and push it in more of an impressionistic direction. Parts of it are working but it’s almost too loose for me. This is the last of the landscapes for a little bit.
- November 3, 2010
No. 60 (whee) comes to us from Coolidge Park in Chattanooga. At the base of the Walnut Street Bridge there is this fantastic park with fountains, a merry-go-round and all kinds of fun stuff. Les and I were there last year during the summer and it was a perfect day for kids to splash in the fountains. Each of the sculptures surrounding the center are animals (the one in the center of the painting is an elephant) and Evi has had a lot of fun climbing on them.
This one was really, really fun to paint. There is so much going on that I had to just let it happen and not try to lock-in and make it too tight. It’s also the first one that has any kind of people in it. There is a boy on the left side and then all kinds of people in the back. It’s super loose and impressionistic but it was a blast to have that element added into the painting.
With a sunny afternoon and some time you could probably find over 100 paintings right in that little corner of the world.
- November 3, 2010
Here’s something a little different. I wanted to shift gears and do a few landscapes and had this shot from earlier in the year.
Every Monday I work on site with a client and come home on Windemere Parkway. When the time changes it’s normally dusk or dark when I’m headed back and occasionally you get a pretty decent sunset. I liked the almost night-time feel of this with the headlights of the cars paired with the sunset. It makes me feel optimistic but at the same time it feels like there is a long way to go. Title is lifted from the new Band of Horses album which (I think) is quite good. That song actually feels perfect for this painting.
- November 2, 2010
Building off of what I learned with No. 57 I cropped this one in tighter, made the background a little more dramatic and then focused in on the apple a little bit more. I like the way it turned out and the composition is tighter as well. By focusing I was able to keep my colors cleaner on the apple and I think that’s what helps it. It did not go on too thick so the yellow near the stem and the light yellow/red on the highlight stayed purer on this one.
About Adam Houston
Adam Houston is an American impressionist oil painter. He lives outside of Athens, GA and paints the landscape of the surrounding country. In 2010 he began the blog 100 Paintings by Adam where he documented his progress as an artist.
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