Anatomy of a Painting

"Olive Trees"
16 x 20, Oil on Canvas

I thought it might be interesting to other painters, and perhaps even more interesting to non-painters, to see the progress of this painting from start to finish. The top photo is my finished painting, which measures 16 x 20 inches. It was painted largely en plein air, in an olive grove in the Luberon area of Provence.

This is the scene I chose to paint (ignore the follow painters under the trees!):

Here is my initial sketch on the canvas. I had previously toned the canvas with a neutral, medium value color. In my sketch, I was interested in the tree shapes and the shadow shapes, and trying to capture how lyrical they were:

Net step, putting in some foreground color, and getting a fix on the shadow shapes before they changed too much as the sun moved. Loved the bright sunlight color--this was getting fun! This is what you always hope for when starting a painting--a little thrill of excitement, when you put the paint on the canvas and say "Yes!".

Now on to stokes of color for the olive foliage, and adding some sky color, as you see below:

Here the hard work begins. I needed to create shapes for the undersides of the olive trees--hard to see, because the branches are so sparsely leaved. Maggie helped me see this better by smudging some of my darker strokes of color to create solid forms for the under-planes of the trees.

OK, now it's been almost four hours, and the time in the field is up. Below you see my painting at the end of the plein air session. You can tell by comparing it to the final version that I made some corrections on the shadow shapes, and opened up the shadow shapes a bit more,  once I got home to my studio. It's hard to resist tinkering with a painting, but I made myself let this one be, and am pleased with the result. Now I want to go back to the olive grove to explore the motif even further!

PS: To see more photos from the session in the olive grove, including the work of my fellow painters,  click here.