red goult

cemetery at goult (oil on board (23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

Here I have spun the colour wheel in my head a bit, in order to examine some colour relationships.  As we know, colour is relative in the sense that it is always dependent on it's context.  I have simply converted all the colours to their complementary opposite, so green becomes red, blue becomes orange etc.  I was wondering whether the relationships, one colour to another, still held.  This painting took me about 20 minutes and was made in situ.

Lagarde

Beech woods at Lagarde (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

It's still really hot here, so it was nice to go up into the hills where its cooler, and there are beautiful shady beech woods.  I painted three images on this particular morning, all of them concerned with the shadows cast by the trees.  For a while, they looked too complex to deal with.  The floor of the woods are covered in copper coloured leaves, and lots of broken branches and debris, but the shadow are deep and cool.  I eventually worked my way towards simplifying  everything in a way that made sense to me.

Sault

Sault 1 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

Sault 2 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

Sault 3 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

I went up painting at Sault one day last week, to get out of the heat.  Sault is a village high up on the plateau of the Montagne de Vaucluse.  Despite it's remote location it was heaving with people because there was a market on, and a lot of other people had the same idea to find somewhere cooler - so it was a bit of a challenge to find somewhere calm enough to paint. It turned out to be a good day with really good cloud formations as a storm formed over the mountains.