Spring Greens – WIP : Large Plein-Air Oil
Posted on May 4, 2011
This is a commission 🙂
It’s great to be doing a large plein-air oil again 🙂 It will take several more sessions on site & several more back in the studio. Way bigger than usual, so good to be working ‘out of the habitual box’. Tables & studio easel outside, on the edge of a step slope. lol, the buzzards were just waiting for this… beware whilst stepping back 😉
Here it is at the lay-in phase. Because there was just so much more drawing than in a normal size, I did something that I don’t usually do. That is I didn’t lay-in the sky right from the beginning & key everything to it right from the outstart. I do however know what lighting conditions will be more or less in the final painting.
130 x 80 cm ( approx 51 ” x 32″)
oil on canvas
© adam cope
Garden, Autumn
Posted on October 27, 2008
Journées Européennes du Patrimoine 2007
Posted on September 17, 2007
Last weekend was the ‘European Days of Heritage’. It’s a wonderful chance to see some of the sites that aren’t always open to public or just not very well known.
Visiting out-of-the-way ‘manoirs’ & ‘chartreuses’ always surprises me. Not just the amount of restoration & rebuilding that has gone on in the Dordogne these last twenty years but also, more quietly & lesser well-known, just how many charming gardens have been sculpted, imagined & manicured. The above garden is an innovative version of a ‘potager classique’ (like the famous Chateau de Villandry) but with a hydralic feature like a feature from the Alhambra. The owner explained to me that sound of gurgling water made the exprience of gardening on a south facing slope more ‘agréable’.
I did a watercolour of the very french formal facade & formally laid-out gardens. But it wasn’t finished, felt like a rush-job & well, why expect very single watercolour to come together successfully first-take, alla prima?
1 hr 15 mins.