FIR GROVE GARDEN - Oil & Acrylic on Canvas 70.0 x 50.0 cm. August 2024.

My latest painting - Fir Grove Garden.  Inspired by a photograph taken in a garden in Hampshire of my wife and father on a sunny Summer’s day, with a clear blue sky surrounded by flowering plants.  I combined two photographs so they looked like they were looking at one another, the composition felt more comfortable that way. To help create the feeling of a quieter moment shared in nature.

As with most of my recent paintings, I was experimenting with coloured base colours for the background.  In this picture, I was trying out a pale orange and bright green for the skin and clothing base layer on some small poster studies size pieces of paper. I enjoy creating these studies as they are often more creative than the final painting execution. The colours were much more vivid than I initially envisaged - but I liked this. The plan for the main painting was to use a more lilac background colour. 

For both figures, I worked the white top to a more detailed level, but I liked the trousers being looser in brush strokes.  I made the colour a more vivid blueish mint green than in real life, which was a little different to how I imagined it, but I was happy with it as an experiment. The right hand side figure - I left the trousers unfinished, in the same way as the poster study.  After marking the figures out in pencil I blocked out the background with a slight vignette, which slowly gets lost with the layers of slightly translucent paint. 

The painting was an experiment and the outcome had a slightly different tone to the one I originally planned.