Studio Painting Commission

I started today on a painting commission.  It's a painter's dream, kind of a paint-what-you-want, with some size and subject flexibility.  The clients, who own a painting of mine from several years ago, have moved and have a new location above a fireplace that needs a painting.  

They asked me about paintings on my website, one of which was too small for the space; the other one is sold.

Local weather has been super hot, humid and stormy, which has derailed my initial plan to head to Lilypons to paint the waterlilies while they are still in bloom.  I have a slight hope that can still happen next week here in the DC suburbs.  If not there, Acadia has some spectacular (but buggy!) marshes around Eagle Lake and Witch Hole, so I may pick up the waterlily idea painting in Maine.  If I do that, it will be to make gouache sketches in Maine and paint the larger painting in oil when I'm back from that trip.

The second idea is to take the too-small painting of a field of poppies and the sketches I have from when I painted it, and work on a new, larger painting.  I roughed in a pattern of lights and darks today on a 24 x 48" canvas and will work refining this in the next week.  The proportions of the larger canvas are different than the smaller painting -- it's wider, so there's a chance to emphasize the expansive side-to-side dimension and increase the foreground emphasis on the poppies.

The painting the clients own is.a landscape with very deep space and we've discussed how a compatible painting should differ from the one they have -- different horizon, change in dimension, pattern in the space.  

In an ideal world, I'd get both the waterlily painting and this wide landscape painting done (and dry) before the client will take delivery in October.  Fingers crossed.