making earth 3

Watercolor on 140 lb cold pressed paper.

One of the things I like most about the transition from autumn to winter in Chicago is the leaves that pile up underfoot and begin to decay, making earth (as Wendell Berry would say). That is the inspiration for this painting, the third in an open-ended series. In making this scene (as in the second piece in the series), I began with a single color field -- a mixture of blue, yellow, and red to make brown -- near the center of the surface, a sheet from an Arches watercolor block. Rather than dampening the block in this piece, I poured the color field in the center of the surface and moved it out toward the edges with a 2" brush. Once the surface was covered, I used narrower brushes to add blue, red, and yellow here and there to accentuate patterns that emerged as the surface began to dry. As in the first two pieces in the series, I sought well-ordered collisions dominated more by brown than by red, yellow, or blue. This is the darkest of the first three pieces in the series, still on its way to the blue black of good earth.