This is the fourth painting in the series of paintings that Suzi Lantz commissioned me to do for her 100 X leadership summit here in Canton.
I wanted to try to lend some perspective to this painting by carefully measuring the perspective of the lines generated by the rocks and the grass between the rocks. I think that perspective is right and I do think that it leads that I towards the distant hills, which is something that I’m going for in this painting. Unfortunately I also tried to greatly simplify those distant hills by painting them as solid colored fields as opposed to the three dimensional shapes that I had used in previous paintings. As a result the distant Hills feel very flat and there’s a little perspective in the background. While there is enough perspective in the foreground, all it does is make it look like the hikers have come from some cardboard cut out mountains.
The rocks in the foreground are massively overworked. They look muddy and man-made. None of the lines or feel organic, in general the whole thing feels much to planned.
Even the grass is overworked.
The hikers them selves are out of proportion, and hastily done. They don’t even look human.
Oh well – mistakes are part of the process of learning.