2020 creek oil 6 16 x 20”
detail of 2020 creek oil 6
3:29 PM: this morning i was ready to get those damned wrinkles out of the newly stretched 26 x 78” canvas. no luck. it’s a very fine portrait linen, which is extremely difficult to stretch so that it’s completely smooth. just a few wrinkles screw it up. i tried removing 6-7 staples & re-stretching, wetting the back so that it would shrink them out….finally i said to myself, “fuck this shit,!” so i found an already stretched 26 x 20” canvas with the same super fine portrait linen i so love, set up a little makeshift table with saw horses & a piece of ply, and got to work! here’s the definition of sumato:
Sfumato (Italian: [sfuˈmaːto], English: /sfuːˈmɑːtoʊ/) is a painting technique for softening the transition between colours, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane.
i was missing this in making the 117 watercolors in my 2020 watercolors series. as well, i was missing the possibiltyof blending the colors & painting into fresh wet paint. i have accumulated lots of beautiful oil colors, which take years to harden & become useless, and many many brushes designed for oil painting. plus, working on this small a scale doesn’t present a problem for my still healing shoulder.
as a late lunch, i made myself a bowl of walnuts and local fruit with goat yoghurt.
tomorrow morning we’’ll be taking our trail walk. if we feel up for it, we’ll go about 1/2 hour further than normal, to a little bridge which, once you cross it, is the gateway to the rest of the trail leading up to the lake, which is about another 3 hour hike. we’ve been wanting to hike up to that lake for a couple of years and i’m hoping this will be the year we do it!