The Way Back Home - Daily Painting
August 1st, 2007
“The Way Back Home” (Central California Coast) - 9 x 12 oil on canvasboard
When I saw this location last week it left me with a feeling of nostalgia and bittersweet longing, even though I have never lived in a rural setting. Perhaps there’s something about a lonely country road that evokes feelings of homesickness and curiosity - wondering what wonderful things await just around the bend.
Can you tell I am becoming seriously infatuated with vivid color?
Note: if you find that this image appears exceptionally dark (not just saturated color but DARK) on your monitor, please let me know. I’m trying to tweak my settings so that images scanned through a Mac appear reasonably correct on a PC.
Very enticing road with lovely curved lines. I like the glowing colours, but I find that the scanner sometimes seems to saturate the colours more than I intended in a painting/drawing. What is around the bend? Perhaps that’s one reason why we like roads, and curved bays with rocks hiding the next bay make us wake on.
w.
Oh, Karen, you got such a flow of purple shadow on the road
that makes me think of watercolor. I like the texture one can get
from oils but I miss the flow of watercolor–here we have both.
The side-lighting on the trees and the glow on the fields are lovely.
The mystery of this curved road seems to symbolize the
journey you are on, now. And we get front-row seats to watch
it and enjoyy it.
Thank you for including us.
It looks perfect on my PC. Your landscapes are so masterfully done! The colors and values look great so your tweaking has paid off, I think–but they always do, so I’m not sure what’s different.
Karen, this is really fantastic — I agree that a curving road is a great subject. What you’ve done really well is to have kept that tree just low enough to let the ccomposition flow beautifully! Your shadows look a bit dark on my monitor, particularly a tree trunk or two and the hill on the far left. BUT I know it’s nearly impossible to get it to look like the original!!
Oops! let me add that the shadows looked better when I adjusted the angle of my screen — sorry about that! That’s one of the hazards of laptops!