Exhibited: Merritt Gallery, Baltimore, & Renaissance Fine Arts, Chevy Chase, MD and Haverford, PA
 
My gracious thanks to the purchaser of this oil.
 
About this oil:
Sometimes you just want to do That Color and for this oil it was all about the purple and how to make it interesting. Dark purple on lighter purple, blue on purple, throw in some aqua and yellow but it is still about purple!
 
It’s interesting to work on pieces like this. Compositionally, it is a very simple design but just painting in wedges of color would is far less interesting than what occurred here. For this oil, color is subtly layered on top of others with more color on the edges of things. 
 
In the course of making those additions, the undulations of the ground begin to show and the yellow trees on the left begin to take on depth and transparency. With the background trees, all of the shades of purple are layered in with an abundance of brush strokes to create complexity and from that, the illusion of complexity and bulk.
 
The result is an oil with striking contrasts and a very convincing purple stand of trees. I feel there will be more purple in my future.