The Sea #2

Maybe you remember the triptych I made a few months ago. The centerpiece is a picture of my grandson and his dad walking towards the sea. I wrote about it in my blog entry of August first. It's a small painting and I have been imagining for some time what it would look like on a really large panel, 120 x 160 cm or something like that. A few days ago I decided to stop imagining and start painting.

Underpainting of 'The Sea #2', oil on panel, 120 x 160 cm

Starting a painting often means thinking about it, making a plan. In this case I wondered should I do the landscape first and paint the figures on top of it, or integrate them in the underpainting. I decided to the latter. They're such an important part of the painting, they should be involved in the equasion right from the start. The downside of course is that you can't paint the landscape in a single stroke as it were, but you have to leave out the figures in the first stage. It's more work, but hey, I love painting, so who cares.

Anyway, here's a picture of that first stage. In my next blog entry I hope to show you what happened next.