‘Semillion, Labadie, Monbazillac’
Large Size Oil on Canvas
81 x 65 cm (approx 26 x 32 inches)
©adam cope
sold

Here’s the finished state. Here’s the link to its Work In Progress : Lay-in for Plein-Air Large Oil Painting.I went out the next day for a second plein-air session with a mental note ‘yellow & grey and not yellow & pink’. As you can read in the WIP blog entry …. “actually I quiet like the overcast mid-tone grey. Still the weather will dictate to me this evening”. What the note meant was to hold fast to the prior, premeditated decision – made calmly in the studio looking at the WIP – to go for a yellow & grey major colour harmony and not yellow & pink. As a sunset progresses, it generally gets pinker & pinker. If I wanted to keep to grey overcast skies as the major, with only some bands of pink as the minor, I would have to ‘fix’ or ‘stop’ in my mind’s eye the sunset at a relatively early point of its progress.

A tip for Plein-Air Painting

A tip to help this difficult plein-air trick is to consciously divide one’s painting time between sky & land. But then, the danger is that they won’t correspond correctly…. A 4pm landscape on a 6pm sky! Sometimes you have to tinker with plein-air paintings back in the studio to correct this issue.

What do you think? Does sky & land correspond correctly in my above painting?

Here’s the painting with a grey frame so as to keep true to the yellow/grey colour theme.