No. 411: "Clip clop"

No. 411, "Clip Clop," watercolor, May 2018.

My paintings are fairly simple. They exhibit more mood than detail, which works in the case of my latest, No. 411, “Clip Clop,” a scene from April 2018 in Geauga County’s Amish landscape.

The Amish of Geauga and Trumbull counties in Ohio are deceptively simple. They are cohesive and guarded, but not necessarily frugal. It’s a pretty robust cash economy, they work hard when motivated and their businesses craftily cater to “English” like us.

Their horses and buggies seem out of place on rural highways, and maybe a little annoying in traffic.  But out in the farms and fields they are serene.  The location for this painting is a gravel path in Burton behind the Red Maple Inn. 
I’ve painted the horse before, but this spring he was out of the barn and doing his job.

No. 304, "Burton," September 2015. Purchased by Kathryn Smith Danna

There was no walking up and saying hello, and the best I could get was my wife's distant phone picture that didn’t enlarge very well. It would be a risky painting — again, more mood than detail. There would be more working by feeling, rather than seeing.

The first things done were the grass and the background.  I made color lists and guessed. The grass and path are buildups of tan, yellow, green, pine and brown.  The background, or the sky behind the trees, was created with layers of pink, purple, blue, gray, brown and white.

I next placed the buggy and the horse onto the path, using a little ink to get the side panels as dark as possible. I wanted the cart to stand out. The horse was fuzzy so I guessed a little, and used another photo of a horse in its harness to — again — get a feel for how the beast would look in motion. The orange reflector is the brightest thing on the paper!

The trees came last after some hesitation. I liked the look of the painting with just the sky background but the more I studied it, the more it looked like a dust storm. The trees are in the natural landscape and I decided to put them in the painting. As it’s April, they are still waking up from winter. They are simply black, gray and white.

There was a bit of work involved with the frame. I had three mats to choose from, but none fit the frame that I chose! And the frame needed a bit of work to achieve a rustic look. That was taken care of by rubbing in some brown acrylic paint. I ended up trimming one of the mats by half so as to not lose too much of the image, and not overwhelm the picture. I took it outside in the sunshine to check it out and snap some pictures.

This is the 14th horse painting or drawing to be completed by a guy who would never actually get on one.