"Sour Milk Gill" Oil Painting by James Swanson

"Sour Milk Gill" Oil Painting by James Swanson
"Sour Milk Gill" From the award winning painting series.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Something Old, Something New

This has happen to me a few times over my career, I make a painting that quite a few collectors want, so I repaint a painting a second time or third time.

There's nothing wrong with doing this and in fact it's quite flattering. 

The thing is not to copy your old painting when you repaint, but enhance it. Try to add that missing sparkle or simplify an area, there is usually some spot I wish I had done different.  Most of the time I try to get the dimensions of the new painting to be different. That in its self can make a big change.

So that brings me to this next Traveler Painting. Meet Traveler Heather May. I've painted a couple of Heathers photos before for this project. You see she lives on this very special little island off the coast of Northern Michigan called Mackinac Island.

Heather May with my painting at Mackinac Islands Museums Art Gallery
It's a place that time forgot. There are no cars or motor vehicles allowed on the island. Everything during the summer needs to be moved by horses. And the fudge is fantastic.- May's Candy Shop  A fascinating place to visit.

Heather lives there year around and is able to take some pictures that only a year a-rounder would see. The winter painting that Heather is standing next to above was inspired by one of her photos. It sold at the opening of the Mackinac Island annual art contest exhibit.

I was contacted after the show by an art collector who saw it to see if I would repaint it, because his wife loved the painting but it was already sold.

So we worked out the details of the painting over a few emails and here is what we did. We decided to take my 12" x 16" painting and make it a 36" x 48"piece. And here is how I went about making it.

The initial start of the new painting. Rubbed some Venetian Red paint into the canvas and marked off the placement of everything. The translation to a bigger canvas took some figuring and some redesigning. Little things in the small painting ended up needing a bit more explaining in this large version. 
In up scaling the small painting to this new one found a few things that I had to do different. One I could only work one side of the painting at a time. Being so large my color palette  could only hold so much paint. So I planned out the sections to do and started with the trees on the right. Those being my darkest darks are aways a great place to start. The other thing about painting larger was the color itself. Defining my warms and cools colors took more studying. Everything stood out so much more. And the size of my brushes. Big brushes, big ideas.
The next section of the painting to tackle was the left side with the houses. Here again little details didn't transfer up nicely and took a bit to figure out. But I remembered painting it the first time and knew the fun things that were coming up to do. But at this point, I'm trying to block the beast in loosely.
OK, blocked in painting. I remembered the snow covered street tying everything together, so that's why I worked the painting like I did. If I had to stop somewhere I knew that would pull it together. There are lots of things to work out here yet, but I was feeling good about where this painting was going at this point
Details, details, details! The life of this painting is in the details. At this point things are resolving themselves pretty fast. the light posts are in, the details of the house windows are on there way, and the trees behind the houses are taking shape. The sky has now had some real attention and has been cleaned up.
This is it. "Winter on Market Street" 36" x 48" oil on linen
The last stages of this painting were in the snow covered street. Some of my nice strokes in the little painting were not working in this bigger size, so I had to work that part out and then I went back it and softened all the hard paint edges and that finished off all of the depth problems I had left.

So there you have it making a mountain out of a mole hill in painting. Thanks to Heather May again for her wonderful inspiring photos to work with and I hope you like the painting I sent you and to the art collector who challenged me have this big painting framed and ready by Christmas. I hope your wife is surprised.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful painting and cool to hear how it came together. Nice one, Jim!

    ReplyDelete

Have a good travel story and some fun and interesting pictures and we can get started on a painting journey.E mail me here with
name, place, and a few pics of the spot,and I'll get back to you.