LINDA H. POST FINE ART

When I get to this point in a painting, it's time for me to decide where the boundaries of the finished painting will be. Since the canvas is pinned to the wall, and the size of the canvas is larger than the painting, I often paint outside the edges that were the original borders. It takes about a month for the stretcher to be handmade to my specs and shipped from California. So I have to make my best guess in advance as to the finished size and go ahead and order the stretch

This painting has been fleshing itself out (seriously, I've been working on some of the flesh) and I now have a working title. It's "A Willing Suspension of Disbelief", a phrase written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about what constitutes poetic faith. In this case, it's about how one creates a perception of reality wholly based in the imagination. This is a pretty complex project. Not just the painting itself, which has a lot of moving parts and hard-to-paint details, but makin

The sky is still red. In order to create the sky-blue-pink I see in my head, it's important to work on everything that juxtaposes it. That way, I can work back and forth between figures, ground and sky. There are always adjustments. Do the heads emerge strongly enough from the background color? Does the sky give a feeling of infinite distance? How do I make the tents almost ethereal, blending with the sky, but still real? Lots of questions. The bonfire on the beach is coming

Three versions. Even if a painting changes radically once I put brush to canvas, I do attempt to get the photo sketch as close as possible to what's in my mind's eye. I played around with the girl on the left, and added a seagull. I really preferred the talking seagull. Then I changed the girl on the right, thinking I wanted more interaction. I liked this composition MUCH better. But something was still bothering me about the composition. It took a while to figure it out. See