I like nothing better than paintings by Carl Marine and Colley Whisson (just two of my favourites). For me they paint so loose, like they have been painted with one brush stroke. The eye never has to labour to interpret their paintings. The looseness of their style creates great unity in their art which is so important for the over all success of a painting I think. This is the way that I’m trying to paint with limited good results.
I’ve always had a less is more approach to painting, but getting the looseness into certain things is proving to be difficult for me at the moment. I’m struggling a tad with a tree. It’s a single tree where the leaf mass only takes about 50% of the trees shape; so the background sky, along with many small branches, take up the other 50%. There is a lot of distracting contrast in the sky areas with the small branches crisscrossing through the light blue sky.
Have you ever had to paint a loose tree with this 50 50 leaf mass? How did you simplify it and still get a loose (labourless) looking tree with a large amount of sky and branches to read well?