For those of you who haven’t visited my blog for a while, my wife and I suddenly moved from our shared home of 6 years (Bad Day, Bad Day and its Identity Shift).  Yesterday’s watercolor experiment (Still Disoriented), was an abstract enactment of a moment from the incident that precipitated our move.

Today’s experiment

I was looking out the window from our new bed in our new room. I was lying down and it struck me that the tilted view of the window from that vantage point echoed the off-center feeling I have been experiencing for the past few days.

View from a Room
9″x12″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

It also struck me that the electrical wires, disrupting a clear view of the foliage was also metaphoric for my situation: interrupted.  Although the wires were silver, gray and black in real life, I made them all black.  In the back of my mind, I thought of the black crows in one of Van Gogh’s last pictures, Wheat Field with Crows.  Black against green however, is not as stark as black against yellow, but I hope that I obtained maximal contrast against the green background.

For the greens, I used a combination of Hooker’s green, Shadow green (Holbein) and olive green glazed with lemon yellow. I pre-wet the sky, after painting in the curtains with Buff titanium (Dailer-Rowney), and dropped in Peacock blue (Holbein).  I do like the orange-colored condenser that hangs off the telephone pole out of view.