A Green Monster

The color green.

Love it and hate it.

It's the color of summer, life, growth, strength. It's very appealing in a small piece, but quickly gets tricky to handle in larger pieces. And by larger pieces I mean anything over 11x14. :)  

Here's a snapshot of two of my works-in-progress.

Green and green...

Theo always wants to get in on the camera action.

And lets me know he has a green rope toy, too.

Back to the point. Stapleton Kerns wrote a timely article on how to deal with the greens of the summer landscape. Wonderful, wonderful article.

http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2012/06/dealing-with-summer-greens.html

Fantastic bit on smuggling red into your paintings: 

Good color in landscape painting often calls for recognizing the role various reds have in the color notes of the painting. There's a story about a venerable New England painter who taught a lot of workshops. At the end of a long day he would run up and down the line of students, outside at their easels when he was tired and he would just say to each of them "more red, more red!" It sounds silly but it was more than a joke, because it WAS good advice. Almost every learning painter fails to get enough red into a painting. I try to weave a lot of it in as it steps on all of those greens that are so annoyingly ...........green. It also takes the electric look out of a sky and keeps shadow notes from being too icy. Red is a wonder product!

I love how Steven Goodman paints his greens. There is always a bit of "pure" green, but the majority of the greens tend toward yellow, orange, blue or brown. I get that hot summer green feel from some of his works.

Today I'm painting reds, yellows and blues into my greens.