3's the Charm

This is the view out of a northeast window in my studio, looking towards Power Square and Eastern Textile. The top image is a thinned oil wash underpainting. Lately these have been very vague sketches, if I have bothered to do one at all. With this painting, it was necessary to understand the space a little more thoroughly before applying opaque paint. I include it here because I really like it, and it is now buried forever under the final painting.

I have attempted this painting three times. The first was exactly one year ago this month, at the start of my re-introduction to oils. Parts of the painting turned out pretty good, but overall I felt as if I had bit off more than I could chew for an onsite painting. The second attempt was during the height of summer. Nothing at all came from it except a wasted canvas. With the river and woods paintings I can be free with the drawing to a certain degree as there is no likenesss to a tree. There is a side of me that really falls for the complexity of portaying complicated spaces, and another side that needs to be expressive and loose. The trick is to successfully walk the fence between draftsmanship and the Hail Mary pass. This is about 12 x 24 oil on dibond.