Norfolk Marsh in Winter

I mentioned recently that I’d been paying homage to Edward Seago in an effort to rekindle my familiarity and confidence with simply applying brush to paper. Here’s the another painting from that series, which again was painted on half imperial sized Bockingford rough paper. The painting is an edited version of my effort as I decided to crop the image across the top and down the left hand side.  I’d overworked the sky and made it look too leaden and cropping it down helped reduce the overbearing weight of the sky and focussed the attention more on the trees. The downside to the crop was that the main focal point is now a little too ‘centred’. And, as ever, there’s a great deal that niggles me about this painting, not least the overworking in the sky (and in the distant trees too which I aimed to achieve with a single brushstroke but ended up fiddling about!) and the  scale of the gate amongst other things!. I was, however, pleased with the collection of trees in terms of the brushstrokes, colour and contrast. What I find enjoyable about really looking in detail at the original works, and then trying to emulate them, is to imagine Seago’s internal editing process – what did he choose to omit in order to make this simple scene so evocative and successful… and what might he also have added or accentuated to suit his composition? I think developing my technical abilities is obviously crucial to my progress, but so too is developing my ‘eye’ for a composition and being able to simplify a scene. Fingers crossed that, with a lot more practice, these two distinct disciplines will develop hand in hand as I progress!

Here’s the inspiration for this particular homage: