The Dark Citadel

Now that Pat and Jeannie Wilshire are using this image for promotion I am able to start showing my painting for their IX 2019 Commission, "The Dark Citadel". It's a very tricky painting to photograph as it has a very specific lighting design which still doesn't come across in this hi-res photograph...suggest you see it in the flesh at IX in Reading PA in October!
I commenced the painting a month ago after painting a series of small pictures aimed at honing my skills at painting skies and other aspects of my work. Quite a lot of thought went into this picture with many roughs in pencil trying to work out the best composition and canvas size/format that best got across what I was trying to do. For instance I chose a Portrait format as opposed to an expected Landscape format as I wanted a wide angle effect so that you are looking up at the sky as well as looking down on the valley and figure. This means that when I hang it at the show the painting needs to placed so that the viewer's eye level is about where the spray from the distant waterfall is lit by the moonlight.
I wanted a secondary focal point in the painting to the moon in the dramatic sky and decided to put a figure at the bottom right but kept very subdued in lighting. She is there in case Pat and Jeannie need a figure to focus on in terms of publicity purposes as a landscape is normally somewhat diffuse in terms of focal point and visual impact. In fact in retrospect I think the citadel with the moon behind it has enough impact anyway so perhaps I needn't have bothered putting her in! I composed it to get as much movement as I could in the picture, there are no horizontals and just the verticals of the buildings, everything else is about diagonals and leading the eye around the painting.
My pencil roughs are very sketchy as I like things to develop as I go along. One drawback with this approach was when I came to painting the canyon cliffs that link the top and bottom of the painting. I knew that I wanted the top of the cliffs and the buildings to reflect the title, "The Dark Citadel" and then somehow the bottom of the cliffs merge into the moonlit valley. This area in between was fairly blank in the rough but it was only when I started painting this area that I realised what I had taken on to try and realise what I envisaged in my head. This area took a whole week to paint as I gradually figured out how the lighting and colour needed to be painted. Incidentally I originally intended that there were going to be many lights on in the citadel but again to reflect the title "The Dark Citadel"I decided it would look more sinister if there were no lights on - who is up there? Is it deserted? etc
Although I am interested in beauty I always like to have elements of darkness in a painting so in this case you have a beautiful sky, landscape and female figure but also there is a dark potentially sinister citadel within it.
I wanted to keep the whole painting within a relatively limited palette based on a Red/Orange - Green Blue complementary axis, the sky for instance is just painted from Phthalocyanine Turquoise, Permanent Orange and Lead Tin Yellow Lemon (all Michael Harding paints). The tonal underpainting of a mix of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Purple which effectively comes across as a kind of Burnt Orange sits under everything and can be seen underlying all the colours in the mountains and valley for instance.
The whole sky and landscape was invented as I went along apart from the figure which was based on photographs I had taken of the lovely Naomi Wood. There was going to be a group of ruins seen from above breaking up the curve of the river meander at the bottom of the painting but I left it out as it was directly below the spur that the citadel sits on in the centre of the picture's width and compositionally just didn't look good. I couldn't move it to the left because that would cut out the nice river curve and it couldn't go to the right as that space was occupied by the figure.
So...please come along to IX this October and see my painting!
Oil on canvas 30" x 40".