House Across the Street

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Today was sunny like yesterday, but I was disappointed to see a white van parked in the driveway of the house across the street. They are starting to get the house ready to be sold. I wasn't going to be able to work on the painting until about 2 in the afternoon, when the front of the house would again be in shadow, but would the van be gone by then?

I had an errand to run (pick up my three paintings that had been in the Oatlands show with the Loudoun Sketch Club), which took over an hour. As I drove home, I wondered if the van would still be there. I got home about 1:30, and the van was gone! I had a quick lunch and got back to work on the painting just as the house's shadow started creeping up the driveway.

I struggled over the color of the sun on the asphalt driveway, and I'm not entirely happy with it. It's closer to the right color than yesterday, but it strikes me as being chalky. It was crazy how quickly the shadow moved down the driveway. I was forced to stop working on this after only about an hour, as the driveway was completely in shadow. I'm going to leave it as is for the time being, but the next time conditions are right I may repaint that part of the painting.

House across the street, oil on linen panel, 12" x 9"

It's a strange little composition. Since I'm looking out the window of my studio (the room that was supposed to be the living room of our house), I could only see a sliver of the house across the street. A maple tree in our front yard is on the right, and I decided to include just half of the tree. This was the glimpse that had caught my eye yesterday, and I decided to paint it just as I had seen it. I'm very interested in the spaces between the houses in my neighborhood, and on my daily walks, I love looking through people's yards into the yards and houses behind them. I take tons of photos, even though I will probably never do a painting from any of them. Just the act of seeing and recording the compositions that I see, as if they were paintings, is enough, and I believe they help me see better when I am painting from life.

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