I didn’t go to my Monday class last week as I was having my first cataract surgery.  That also meant I didn’t do too much painting early in the week.

I did do some work on the Red Boat House painting on Wednesday — mainly experimented a bit with some areas of water.  Then in class on Thursday teacher (Ed) suggested I spend most of my time fixing the pylons under the boat house.  They had been bothering me, as they were not straight.  Ed said not to worry about whether they were straight or not but to fix the values and color and get the lighting correct.  So I worked on those issues, and while I was at it, I decided to go ahead and try to paint in some of the cross-wood pylons.  Then I worked on the water in the area under the boat house.  And finally, I repainted the boat to try to get the shape more accurate.  The boat will now have to be repainted again, as I’m not crazy about the colors.  at home over this weekend, I started reprinting the mountains.  I experimented with some different colors.  Values not good, so I’ll be redoing that area — the mountains on the left side of the painting. (I didn’t have time to take on the rest of the mountains, but will try to get to them soon.)

Finally, I worked on the water in the lower right side of the painting.

Over the past week at home I worked on two things: the red boat house, and the water-which-is-in-shadow.  So with the boat house I worked on getting a better color for the roof and for the sides, and also tried to get the door to look more like a door.  I wanted more contrast between roof and sides, and also wanted to begin to make the roof look a little more “used”.

With the water in the lower right side of the painting I worked on getting better angles for the ripples and trying to get a color that would work.

Today in class I continued work on the water.  So dark water in both the right and left lower part of the painting needed to look like they had some texture and some movement — but not too much of either.  I knocked down the texture I’d painted on at home and worked on getting the movement of the waves better aligned.

During the week the more I looked at the texture I’d gotten with the palette knife the less I liked it.  I had pretty much decided to scrape most of it off but thought I’d run that idea by teacher, who was fine with that plan.  So I scraped away enough of that over-the-top texture and tried to tone it down while still keeping the image of water.

Last thing I did today was re-paint the boat.  The upshot of this activity is that I’m going to have to repaint it again!  Lost the motor when I enlarged the boat (when I was trying to fix the angles at the back of the boat.  And the colors don’t work the way I had hoped.  After it dries, in a couple of days, I’ll give it another try.

For the past couple of weeks my red boat house painting has gone through several iterations of playing with color and values.  Still all quite preliminary.

Part of the reason for the experimentation is that teacher last week said he really wanted me to feel freer trying new combinations and ideas and not feel too wedded to the original reference photo — at least give up the notion of reproducing the photograph, as I’m supposed to be creating a piece of art, not a copy of something that already exists.  Strong words, but I am taking them to heart — at least I’m trying!

This week in class I told teacher I wanted to focus on figuring out how to make the water look like water.  He suggested I try working with palette knife to create some appearance of texture.  You can view my initial attempt in the photo I’m posting here. I used a palette knife with a rectangular shape and loaded paint on the bottom and side and then tried to hold the knife at an angle and “draw” back and forth.  As you can see, varying degrees of success.  I’ll keep at this task over the next few days.  After that I may scrap the idea because I also want to learn how to paint this image of relatively calm water and reflections without going the texture route.