Murmuration

This piece has heavy texture in places. This texture comes from building up heavy layers of paint, which provides a rich history for the piece, not all of which is always visible. The piece is finished with a coat of Liquitex satin varnish and a cold wax rub, both of which help protect the painting over time. The painting has a satin/matte finish. This piece is framed in a white 12"x12" Cardinali Renewal Core Floater Frame that is 3/4" deep. The frame is screwed into small wooden dowels that have been glued to the back of the wood panel. If you want to replace this frame down the road, you can do so by removing the screws from the back and carefully removing the wood panel from the frame. The back of the frame includes a sawtooth hanger and bumpers at the bottom for hanging the piece. A certificate of authenticity is adhered to the back of the piece using archival-quality adhesive.

My goal with this piece was to work with a limited color palette, playing close attention to “color value”, which is the relative lightness or darkness inherent in each color. This dark/light value in each color can have a major impact on the composition. When you put two different colors next to each other, you already have a difference in hue. But if one color is inherently darker or lighter than the other, you also have a second different in terms of value. These differences are key to the composition and are how we can lead the viewer’s eye around a scene. The eye first goes to areas of high contrast, so we exploit that to guide your eye where we want you to look. I’ve been wanting to paint a barn for a while now, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long! I used the Zorn palette -- black, titanium white, cad red, and yellow ochre -- and knew I wanted to mix up a lot of beautiful olive green by combining black and yellow ochre. The point to any limited palette exercise is to make sure that each color you mix on your palette includes small amounts of the other colors too, which produces the same kind of color harmony that we see in nature. My goal was to make the barn the focal point, which I did by using color contrast (that cad red really pops) and value contrast (the heavy highlights and shadows on the building). I also made sure that the horizon line was bright and clear, so that the barn would stand out beautifully against that. I added interest below by using a toothbrush to make the trees and bushes and a silicone basting brush to make the grass shapes. I initially added the fence using charcoal, then I went over that with some acrylic. I sprinkled some flowers here and there. I originally toned the entire piece with a light yellow ochre wash. At first I left that as the sky, then I used a round wire tool and a dry brush to make the bird shapes. I recently learned the word “murmuration”, which is what happens when certain flocks of birds all fly together, making some cool shapes that make the flock feel like a single entity. After adding the murmuration shapes, it looked interesting, but it wasn’t enough in the sky, by far. So I mixed up more olive green by combining black and yellow ochre, then used a round veggie scrubber to lay that down in circular shapes in the sky. I’ve been doing this more lately, and I think this will end up as a signature look in many of my acrylic pieces going forward. The end result is super interesting to look at, which helps draw the viewer’s eye up in to the sky. At that point, the composition looked good, but the colors were a little weak. So I added a glaze of India yellow across the piece, primarily in the sky but also some on the barn and hillside. That added a warm glow to the entire piece that I just love.