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| 'Distant Red' 11x14 pastel ©Karen Margulis painting available $145 |
Take today's landscape. It is an autumn scene from New Jersey around the Edwin B Forsythe Wildlife Preserve. The grasses were wonderful shades of gold and the distant trees were showing signs of color. It was a wonderful time of year for enjoying the wetlands.....but it was New Jersey.....not the South Carolina Low Country.
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| My thumbnail and working plan |
This was important to my collector. She came to my studio to make a purchase. (it is always nice to meet and share my work in person) She was interested in a marsh landscape and loved the painting on my easel...this NJ Marsh. She knew it wasn't the LowCountry though and it wouldn't work for her. How did she know? She loved the marsh and water but knew that the red trees didn't look like her marsh. They weren't LowCountry trees!
There is a lesson in this exchange. It is fun to make up a landscape or combine references but to be authentic it is important to KNOW your landscapes....know your trees and water and skies. Some viewers won't care but many will know and will care. My collector did find a Lowcountry marsh that spoke to her and my NJ Marsh will wait for another chance.
Painting Notes: Uart paper 400 grit with a 4 value underpainting using warm colors, rubbed in with pipe foam.
2 comments:
This is beautiful and I can think of subjects where I'd need to treat something in it like a portrait. Landmarks demand a portrait approach, there might be elements you can't change. This is a good guide to those places where I could make changes but have to identify what makes the place unique and special.
I've done lake scenes from Canada and a friend says "I've seen that, it's Lake Tahoe!" Done one of an East Coast creek and someone says "I love that place in Oregon, my dad took me fishing there." That's cool and says the painting really works.
Without a landmark, being able to capture the place for itself and have people see it exactly as it is would be awesome. Thanks for these tips on watching for tree shapes and types. Those distinguish where it is regionally sometimes.
It's also something to watch when making up scenes, putting Western cottonwoods together with Southern live oaks in the same painting may not be plausible.
So true! Even though there are marshes all the way up the Atlantic coast, where I grew up in FL is very different from each place I've lived or visited all the rest of the way up the coast (FL, GA, SC, VA, CT, and Maine). So many scrub palmettos & live oak all the way up to Charleston...I miss that stuff. But now that I'm living in CT, the trees are quite different here. Been here a while now, & I'm still learning these varieties.
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