Luberon storm

luberon storm I (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

luberon storm II  (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

luberon storm III  (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

Here are three small paintings, made one after the other, a few weeks ago as a storm worked it's way up the valley.  Sometimes, being forced to work very fast is a very good thing - no time for thinking to get in the way, just look and record.

L'Isle sur la Sorgue

L'Isle sur la Sorgue (oil on board 25cm x 32cm) David Atkinson

It seems that I am becoming preoccupied with the ephemeral - shadows and reflections.  It is a bit like the fascination of painting skies (something else I like doing).  Everything changes constantly, obliging you to work in a fast and fluid way.  Reflections in water gradually reveal themselves the more you look, and it's a challenge to find a range of mark making that somehow convey all that complexity.  This small painting was made in situ in about an hour, looking down into the river Sorgue.

beech tree shadows

beech woods (oil on canvas 100cm x 65cm) David Atkinson

I have become very preoccupied with shadows as a subject this summer - they are so ephemeral yet so important to how we perceive the world.  They can feel dark and substantial or light and fleeting, and their colour hard to define.  This painting is one in a short series that I have been developing in the studio having started in situ, layering paint and disrupting the surface to try and capture some of the feeling and mystery of  this place.

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.

chateau de bourgane

chateau de bourgane (oil on wood 30cmx30cm) David Atkinson

I painted this a few kilometers away from here at the chateau de Bourgane - it's a very modest chateau with beautiful dilapidated gardens.  I think it has an wonderful atmosphere, and I have painted there quite a lot.  This particular painting was made in a box hedge labyrinth with huge cedars growing up between the hedges.  It gives a fantastic structure of verticals and horizontals that provide a huge range of painting possibilities.