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Have you ever visited a friend’s or a collector’s home and seen a panting you did some time in the past that made you cringe? Maybe you’ve been seated at dinner across from the earlier piece and spent reflective moments thinking about what you’d do with it now, after five or ten years’ more experience.

 

Of course, you have to assume that the painting is still on display because the folks love it just the way it was when they purchased it in the first place.  It never feels right to say, “You know, I could make that scene SO much better if you’d just give it back to me for a few weeks.” This might not go over too well.

 

This past summer I had the good fortune of having a dear friend who’s collected my work over the years hire me to rework a painting she didn’t think had the oomph of my current landscapes.  We’d helped hang her art collection in a new home, and I recall at the time subtly mentioning how faded the work looked. (That seemed better than saying how boring the thing looked to me!)

 

Valley Guardians is a 12 x 22” pastel, so the first thing I did was take it out of its frame and get it out from behind glass. At the time it was initially framed, the only non-reflective glass was that cursed hazy stuff that obscures anything that’s not pressed right up against it. Thus, this was glazed with standard picture glass, which had picked up film over time. Once uncovered, I could really look at what I had before me.  

 

 

My first thought was how washed out the color was and how evenly-textured the landscape was from foreground to background. All the usual tricks I currently use to reinforce the sense of distance from foreground to midground to deep distance were subtle, at best. What was needed was more contrast from warm to cool colors, and from bold strokes to creamy blended passages.

 

I immediately added blue to the right side of the sky, making it obvious where the sun was coming from.  Next I experimented with much warmer colors and deeper ruts and shadows on the road, the main lead into the scene. Likewise, I added some rich sunset orange to dried autumn grasses on the small hill up front. Softer, smoother applications of a bit cooler orange on the large hills to the left made the sense of evening sunshine there more dramatic.    

 

 

Soon I deepened the shadows in the midground shrubs with browns and deep reds, purples and blues. Some rich yellow-green and orange-green highlights brought the shrubs to life and gave them more dimension.  A variety of sky holes punched into the shapes created a nice interplay with the hills behind. And more emphatic orange strokes across the flat midground plane gave the illusion of streaks of light popping through the trees.     

 

 

Adding much richer, more obvious strokes of pigment to the upright poplars and some nice lavenders to the foreground grassy slope made a nice transition from the hot sunshine to the shaded road. Whoops! I noticed that the shapes of the poplar clumps were virtually the same width, so made the right clump into two distinct smaller shapes: three different forms rather than two very similar ones.    

 

Much of this work was done using the sides of pastel chunks maybe three-quarters of an inch long. I prefer to use the medium this way as far as possible into a painting to avoid the look of too many fussy lines everywhere competing for attention.  Later on, I judiciously start tipping the chunks up, looking for sharp edges on their sides that will leave behind distinct, hard-edged marks. This is visible in the new trunk details in the upright trees.   

 

 

Yes, the grassy hillsides behind the poplars are in the shade. However, they were looking quite cold and lifeless, so I added some rich mauve tones. Up front, I added very distinct orange strokes in the grasses to bring them even more forward now that the midground shadows had been perked up.

 

A much richer blue to the sky was called for to stand up to all the other vibrant enhancements.  Blending the sky to create a creamy bleed from pale warm blue on the left to a much richer, darker blue on the right created a border between the sky and the very far back hills.  Time to redraw the distant oak trees on the far right so they no longer looked like soft clouds. Lastly, I added more purples and lavenders to the shaded grasses above the road.   

 

 

As this was a commission situation, it was time to run all my changes by my friend. This is why some artists refuse to do commissions: nobody else gets to say what a painting needs. As I do several commissions a year and am used to turning over a bit of my autonomy on commissioned works, I encouraged her suggestions.

 

“Color and marks are too strong, especially in the foreground. Back off a little.” I did some blending, used some softer transition colors, and happily re-signed the work.

 

 

I urged her to reframe with non-reflective glass. My framer uses Tru-Vue AR (for anti-reflective). I haven’t been to see the updated version of Valley Guardians in it’s home. However, I’m confident that I’ll be delighted to visit the old friend now that we’ve refreshed our relationship!