General Store

Escaping the Stygian gloom of "The Vampires Of Venice" series I stumble into the light of the desert lands of South West America with another "The Big Sky" painting. The work I have been doing with monochromes is now being incorporated into the American landscapes that I will be painting, this being the first one. All of the landscape in "General Store" is based on a monochrome underpainting but this time there is a lot more showing through than I used to have. This now links up the land and buildings in a more satisfying way, indeed I had originally planned to have all the landscape in much darker shadow using lots of opaque paint but when I had got to the stage where the sky was finished I really liked the quality that the land had against it purely as a monochrome. I resolved then to keep the dusty pink general colour it all had and subtly worked colour into that instead of my original plan of much darker colour. I think it has a nice quality of light which I am going to develop in future paintings, indeed I might go back to some recent trial "The Big Sky" paintings and rework them nearer to this look.
The location is near Death Valley in California.
Oil on linen 30" x 20".
There is a short step-by-step progress through this painting including what colours I used in previous posts on this blog.