I’m taking a break from family portraits (see Once More with Feeling, Family, Holding Hand). Although I’m not one to forego repetition, now and then a change of pace is welcome.

Today’s experiment:

I mentioned in another post that I like to go on the porch and read in the morning. There is a big bushy tree in the neighbor’s yard. Ever since I have been reading up about  the art of Paul Cézanne and Hans Hofmann, I think of portraying that tree as a collection of spheres.  The fig tree in our yard also can be reduced to solid shapes, but what they are is not as clear cut as is the shape of the neighbor’s tree.  To truly emulate the cubistic nature of some of Cézanne’s work, I would have to somehow divide the space into different planar divisions.  I can’t seem to visualize this beyond the spherical shapes that make up the tree in the background.

I tried to use some of Hofmann’s principles (as I understand them) to portray depth in my sketch. the reddish purple shape on the left side of the picture is supposed to recede into the background, since it is a coolish color. The red/yellow shape on the upper right, is a warmer color. I hoped that this shape, representing an umbrella would appear to be projected forward in space.  I glazed my ‘spherical’ tree with Prussian blue, a cool color, so it would appear to be more distant than the fig tree, which I washed with lemon yellow (a warm color).

There is a pictorial relationship between the umbrella shape and the black shape of the barbecue. I wanted to draw the viewers’ eyes into the picture from the left by way of the blue sky. I’m not sure if this works.