Adding Human Interest

 I am staring into the finished colored version of my most recent landscape painting and am at a lost to find a connection with the painting.  Perhaps I've been doing a number of similar paintings lately and the subject matter has become trifle trite?  Perhaps I've become a little habitual in my presentation.

Time to call in the cavalry for the rescue, sans the soldiers.  I am hoping that the presence of horses might add some human interest to the landscape, which  helps to connect with the viewer, me.  

I am blending in the horses with the background to make them look less obtrusive, but using dabs of titanium white as reflected highlights to make the animals stand out.  Now that sounds like an oxymoron.  I am also adding in wilted trees to augment the landscape.  After all this is the landscape of the west shown in cowboy movies, I surmise.  

I am really going to town with the highlighted effect so I am painting all my horses with that kind of illumination.  For the horses in the front row, I am actually painting the silhouette with white first and then come back to fill in with other pigments, leaving a sheath of white to achieve the back-lit effect.  

I am trying to break up the even spacing of the animals by adding a black one in the back and using dead tree trunks to further disrupt the perceived uniformity in spacing.

I am making the eroded, gouged faces of the landscape more prominent, to better illustrate the truncated part where the river cuts through.

I suppose my painting now is more animated, figuratively and literally.