New Karoo painting in progress

I have started a new landscape of the Karoo. The original photograph was taken by a friend. He captured a beautiful moment during a storm. I had to change the format of the photo to fit my canvas so I took a fair bit of poetic licence with it. The difficulty, always, when painting from a photograph is how truthful to be with the colours. The camera captures the "real" colours of a landscape. In this case they were rather dark and sombre and inhibiting. I decided to use a technique I have developed which helps in these situations, using opening colours.
Mine is Orange, so I loaded the brush with it and let rip. Soon ideas began to flow.
These "spur of the moment" decisions are important if you want to keep the painting fresh. At this time I knew I could not sustain that thought, so I decided to stop for a while and come back to it later.

A week later.


The orange I used in the beginning has all but disappeared and been replaced by yellow. I felt this was more truthful to the original image, but I am not sure if I will keep all that yellow. And my instincts are crying out to fill that white space in the top centre, but something is stopping me. It is an area of totally pure canvas. I almost want to keep it there because it is so "wrong" and against the rules of painting really. It seems to be saying something to me- I don't know what- maybe something like, "Watch this space!" In a wierd kind of way, I like the sort of tension and expectation it evokes- it disturbs me, but it keeps asking questions.
Maybe it is saying "look up" or "look there!" A sort of message. OK, now it sounds like I'm smoking something, so I will stop with this line of thought, but I really would like to know what you think!
Oh yes, just by the way, if you want to rescue this painting from further abuse, please contact me.

Magnificent obsessions

When I look at the work of some artists I realise that much of their art is informed by an obsession with something or other.
I don't know who coined the phrase, "Magnificent Obsession", but this definitely applies to most of the artists in Cape Town whose work I admire and appreciate.
Their art has a coherency, a consistency of theme and seems to reveal a message.
Look at the work of some of the artists under the link, "Cape Town artists" and see what you think.
Judy Woodbourne is a master of the technique of etching.

Some artists are obsessed with certain media or materials, or subject matter.

I don't seem to have found my magnificent obsession yet. I can only paint if something really touches me or moves me. These tend to be outside myself- landscapes, people, trees. Whenever I paint from my inner being or psyche it feels wrong. It seems that I only have access to certain emotions through paint- anger, frustration, discontent. All I seem to achieve then is a sort of visual whinge, which I couldn't inflict on an audience. I would be embarrassed as I feel that the viewer would hear this awful whining sound coming through the canvas which would be so irritating and painful they would not stay to look.
So for now, I will just keep on painting outer landscapes until I can get my inner landscape to feel more peaceful.

Karoo Mountains