This painting is So Difficult. I continue to engage in mental and artist gymnastics in hopes of making it good enough to sign.
This is where I last left you, in the saga of Can I Actually Finish This?
I found a painting by Bierstadt that had light and clouds and mountains in the distance; briefly I deluded myself by thinking I could copy his technique. Then I saw a poster with rays of light coming through redwood trees, advertising Kings Canyon National Park, and briefly deluded myself into thinking rays of sunlight would look good here.
Using either of those ideas would be the art version of “duplicitous language”. It is inspirational to look at other people’s brilliant art, but copying would look contrived, pieced together, and derivative (meaning obviously stolen). There must be a way to be influenced by others without actually copying.
Next I spent time looking through the 30,000+ photos on my laptop, hoping that if I found the original photos that a solution would come.
I FOUND THE PHOTOS! These were taken up North Fork Drive in Three Rivers back in 2010, I think, but now I can’t remember the exact month or the year. (Gimme a break here—33, 224 photos!)
These aren’t really very much help. Look at the overhead canopy of leaves, the somewhat disconnected branches, the skinny trunks. It is the light and shadow that make this a nice photo, but I cannot duplicate what is here convincingly.
I kept studying the painting, wondering what was wrong with the trees. I’ve thickened the trunks and begun adding bark, so what’s wrong here? Maybe it is that one curving from the left over the road that looks phony-baloney. You can get away with weird stuff in photos, but if you copy it in your art, you will look ignorant.
It was time to study some real trees, so I took photos of different oak trees while out walking.
This will require more thought, more experimentation.