Street Corner in the Early Morning

Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 36" x 24"
Category: Landscape reproduced
Brushes: Filbert 12, Flat 10, and White Sable 6
Other: Colormixing knife

I loved the various stages of transitions this very ambitious project has gone through. As you could tell from the earlier blog-entries, how procrastinated this self assignment got. Finally, when I finished it over the weekend, I could not stop wondering what kept me from this work for such long time.

Little history

I was cooking up this idea of paining a suburban street or a street corner for a long time when one day, some five years back I saw a picture of a narrow street of Rome in a book that I borrowed from Sunnyvale library. I instantly fell in love with that worn-out yet bright street houses. And I knew that I am going to reproduce that kind of scene in a sketch or a painting. Not immediately though because my graduate studies were too grueling to let me take any other assignment into hand.

Then after almost a year or so, I received a gift of a painting class from my HD. I thank him for this thoughtful class! In the class, I had to choose a subject for the painting and for me that was obvious! I showed my subject to my arts instructor and she agreed that it would make a great oil-painting project although she cautioned me that it would be a challenging assignment nonetheless so I picked a small canvas of the size of 8 x 10. For some reason, the paining didn't move beyond the initial drawing part. The canvas was lying around for almost a couple of years and later I painted some tulips on that canvas.

I nearly forgot about it until later that year I got a bigger canvas with no particular subject in mind. I started the search after running out of ideas for the suitable object to paint. I didn't want to pick anything too grand to handle for I was expecting our baby in the coming months.

There was nothing much appealing after tulips, hibiscus, and black-eyed-susans(yet to paint). So I hesitantly accepted a 'street view' (that would later become 'Street Corner in the Early Morning') suggested by HD. Hesitant because I wasn't too sure if I could create the color-composition this required. Plus, I had never made any architectural painting before. But there was something about it that I decided to work on it.

I drew the picture and started off but let's just say, life came in the way and I couldn't work on it. It was September of 2006. I revisited this a couple of more times since then but I finally tofinish it, I had to push everything aside. And then painted it last week. And to my surprise, I finished it in less than three days!

I jumped with joy when I looked at the finished piece. I finally, finished it. Yes, I did! I am just so happy that I don't really know what to do. I have one more project at hand but I want to let this happy-feeling sink in first.

Color Notes

I used most of the following hues for Spring
Reds using Cadmium Barium Red Light with yellow
Greens Sap was the only green in my box and played with it mixing in Burnt Umber & some white
Blues Pthalo Blue and French Ultramarine in different intensities

Possibilities

Similar work could be repeated for a different time of the day

Books References

Color Mixing Bible by Ian Sidaway