The origins for this painting came from a photo I had taken of my parent's garden at night in the winter with a fresh fall of snow on the ground. The photo shown below had an atmosphere and lighting that I liked and from this grew an idea of an overgrown garden in the fuzzy moonlight with the moon being the only bright area in the picture, everything else being dark and desaturated. In my mind I saw the setting as a garden on a slope leading up to a ruined house on the top silhouetted against the moonlit sky. It was composed roughly around the Rule Of Thirds with the sky occupying the top third and the terrace the figure walks on as the bottom third. It was difficult to compose as apart from the moon there is no dominating feature so it relies on the central grouping of the pond, terrace and steps to hold the composition together. I roughed in these features first and then made the rest up as I went along offsetting one element against another asymmetrically for variety of shape and tone. It operates within a very limited tonal range, the colouring based around a kind of violet/brown base, cold bluish highlights from the moonlight against warmer brown violets of the garden, this colour scheme being alleviated by the introduction of some greens albeit quite desaturated. I wanted the garden to look jumbled and overgrown so the painting had to look like that with the eye wandering around the picture at different elements, the only compositional place to start being the moon in the sky, even the figure is kept back as I did not want her to be the first focus of the painting.
The model was the lovely Naomi Wood, the reference photo coming from an earlier session for another painting.
This is a painting that should be heading for IX in October this year.
Oil on linen 30" x 20". There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.
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