I wanted to paint something from my imagination the other day, and this is what I came up with. It’s an attempt to mimic a style that I saw in a painting by Joseph Zbukvic, and now that I look at it again, I feel like it’s close enough to his composition to say that it’s not really a painting so much as a study. I wanted to explore painting a big gnarly tree as a negative shape. While I think the tree itself came out ok, the composition as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. The stone in the foreground is just added noise, and the placement adds weight to the left half of the composition. If I try this again, I’ll need to remove that stone altogether, or move it to the right to balance the composition.

I didn’t capture the sense of scale, or the sense of atmosphere that Joseph Zbukvic achieved in his painting, my composition skills are just dramatically wanting. But, I’ll keep learning, and keep trying new things. Anyway, here it is.