This is a painting that I started in December and on which I finally put the finishing touches just a week or so ago. It’s a large piece, a 20″ tall by 60″ wide canvas, that really accentuates the panoramic aspect, one that I enjoy working in. I really was at a standstill on this piece at one point, really savoring the composition and the sky but not knowing how to bring it to completion that fit with where it was at that point.
But it came.
I’ve really been enjoying this sort of groove I’ve fallen in over tha last month or so, feeling the tedium of painting the skies growing, with the thousands of small strokes slowly building to a sort of crescendo. There’s been a common thread of color running through this work, including a very large 36″ by 60″ painting that I am working on now. The sky is comprised of dozens of different shades of blue and green and yellow all over deeper violets and reds that peek through in tiny almost unseen glimpses. To me, these pieces are really about the light of the sky pulling out the dark colors of the ground below, creating a tension between the light and dark that gives the piece the emotion it emits.
For me, this emotion goes back and forth between joyous, almost triumphantly defiant, and a bit sad, as though the leaves are moments slipping away, opportunites lost. Perhaps it is both. Whatever the case, I find myself liking this piece a lot, looking at it quite often as it sits over the fireplace in the studio. Now to find a title…
Redtree Times 
This central tree, this sky — already familiar from your work as it appears on the blog. I’ve already said how much I love your skies. My morning’s post and your post today resonate and vibrate for me in the same range:
http://touch2touch.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/sunday-in-the-park/
Not the artist’s emotions, perhaps? Not yours or Seurat’s?
My emotions resonate in the same range. Thank you.
When I looked again, I thought, Oh my, Gary’s scene is so empty, Seurat’s is so full, and yet —
The sky, the trees, the atmosphere — are both.
They may have been there, but I don’t remember seeing leaves flying from your trees before.
The wind is visible here, and strong. It’s appealing.
The contrast that catches me is less between earth and sky than between the movement of the tree and its leaves and the stolid, impassive houses.
There aren’t any windows to throw open to catch the breeze!