I wish to get a handle on these remaining starts before I take some time and get my right hip replaced
Leave the rocks. They’re already where you want to be: flat, broad slabs of one maroon, no modeling, no planes explained. They read as weight and rhythm, not as boulders. Any more work on them would start describing.
The water is where the explanation still lives,
One layer, aimed at one place: the pool at the bottom.
Everything above it is doing its job. The green field and the pale trunks are flat and quiet, and the gray lower trunks step forward against the dark rock. The cascade zigzags down through the navy slabs with real conviction. Don’t touch any of that.
The pool is where it’s still soft. Gray, lavender and blue are scrubbed together at roughly the same value, so the water lands without an event. For the last pass:
Pick one dark. Put a single band of navy, the rock color, across the pool just below the fall’s landing. It gives the white something to crash into.
Gather the blue. The cerulean is spread evenly from top to bottom. Pull the most saturated blue into the pool right under the fall, and let the upper water stay whiter.
Keep the strokes horizontal and broad. A few wide passes will settle the bottom against all that vertical and diagonal energy above.
Then stop. If the pool goes down in under an hour, that’s the signal I’ve got it.
After a month of high-horizon paintings, I’m turning it upside down.
All month the water has carried the prismatic progression, moving the eye down through the canvas. This one starts from an image I found online and reverses the Fibonacci spiral. The horizon drops low, the sky takes over the progression, and the focal point lands at the bottom right.
Time to get a start on it.