I really apprecitated this side by side look at my painting… so I will include work that I didn’t work on yesterday but had worked on the day before.
Pair 1 (Savage trees, grey/cool)The first layer is almost a grisaille — cool, structural, withholding. The second layer made a committed temperature argument: the burnt sienna root mass in the lower right is the decisive move. It's not decorative. It pulls the whole lower register into warmth and gives the grey-green trunks something to push against. Without it, the painting risks staying handsome but inert. With it, there's a fight going on.
Pair 2 (Savage trees, orange/warm)
The first layer established the architecture — where things are, how the light falls, the basic color logic. The second layer did something specific: it humanized the surface. The trunks got warmer and more particular, the root zone became tangled and weighted, and that white impasto note in the lower center introduced a scale reference that makes the water feel genuinely wet. The blue-violet in the foreground water held, which was the right call — it's the most surprising color decision in either version and it earned staying.
Pair 3 (horizontal bands)
These may be the most instructive pair. Image 5 is a first statement — bold, declarative, unambiguous. Image 6 is a first statement of a different painting entirely, not a second layer of Image 5. The orange broke open, the foreground grew complex, the sky shifted temperature. If these are sequential, something fundamental changed in the intention between sessions. Worth asking: what was I in each?
Like the first pairs’ first layer—itis archetectural, where things are, the division of space
Like the first pairs’ first layer—itis archetectural, where things are, the division of space. These are the demizing lines that seperate one space and distance from another.
The dark tree shapes are the first joining. A shape and value designed to both hold the sky to the groung and to hold the barn structures. The Barn Structures are the tag or joining of the foreground grasses to the the trees and while they serve double duty as the also provide context and therefore scale to everything else.