Stapleton Kearns

Tonight I am going to show the several stages of a painting I made recently. This is a little one, an 11 x 14. I don't always draw a monochrome study under a painting but I do sometimes, especially when I am worried about how to work the thing out. In this case I had a lot of changes I wanted to make. and the light was coming and going, I got fog and I got rained on. I made up about half of this painting. I will show you a couple of photos of the real location down the page a ways.

There is no white at all in the paintiing at this point. I am using ultramarine and a little burnt sienna , I paint it in and wipe back with my rag and mineral spirits.

I have painted on this location before. Although it was high tide when I was on the location, it was low tide in my painting. I wanted to get that dark and grave foreground. That would set up the design for me to light a path across the middle ground. The couple in the middle distance actually walked by and joked about me putting them in my picture. I did too, but they never knew it. I like the gesture I got for her, she looks to be striding enthusiastically along with a hint of goofiness. There is a lot of careful measurement and plotting of the various elements in the sketch at this point. I pushed it around for about about 2 hours before I committed to using opaque paint. Since it was grey it didn't change much. Several times the sun did come out and I used the effect when it lit up the area in the middle of the painting.

Here I have started to block in the big masses. I am using a big #10 brush to do all this. I also have a rigger for drawing little lines.I am trying to everything simply and very quickly because at this point it began to rain and I thought I was going to get chased out. But then it stopped and the light came out again and lit the area I wanted to make my punchline.

There is what I brought back to my car at the end of the day. I will probably clean it up in the studio when it is dry. I may even see something in it that looks really wrong that I didn't notice before. I sometimes work on them a lot in the studio, at other times only a little.

The elapsed time out there was about 5 hours. In that time I had about four different kinds of weather and constantly changing light. Here is what the location actually looked like.

And here it is with a little fog!

I would show you the rain but I wanted to keep my camera dry. As you can see I pushed this thing around a lot. I made a painting there. I did not "paint the day" or copy nature uncritically.