To say that I didn't like it would be a lie. I do like it.
I don't want to label it as being soulful, but it does have that quality of beckoning to your other senses and to explore beyond what is on the paper. Yet, something was amiss. I couldn't put a finger on it but I feel the void. It is like drinking a cup of hot rum cider with a stuffy nose. You taste the rum alright, but missed the aroma of the hot cider and spice. When I caught sight of the image on the tube my brain processed it as two travellers on a ride. What registered was the swath of land and the hazy diffused light. It could present itself as tranquil, or lost. The travellers might be taking in the scenery, or just enduring. Who knows.
I have to zoom out my lens, and see if I could capture the rest of the vibes.
Why not change the orientation to portrait.
I positioned the river bend at the extreme bottom of the paper, and the sky opened up in a dramatic way. Now I could immerse in the picture.
The immense sky was featureless. It could use some embellishing. Cirrus clouds, anvil head clouds, flock of birds, high noon are possibilities. I settled on a mountain peak.
With this format in mind, I embarked on my own journey again, this time to do the painting in a portrait orientation.
I tried to avoid harsh outlines since the overall mood is one of dust and haze. I needed the distal end of the river to be blended in with the background. I painted a rider with really loose definition and
rather diffused brushstrokes, trying hard to just evoke a perception, rather than describing a discrete object.
Unfortunately I failed to eschew old habits and re-defined my riders with added brushstrokes and rendered them too "solid". Ah, that is another story.
I decided to show 2 reflections in water this time, one for each rider..
Again these reflections were painted on the back of the paper, as the top layer of the paper fiber worked to add that haze filter effect.
For that sepia look I summoned the help of coffee. Yes, plain old coffee. No sugar, no cream.
This natural pigment (if you want to call it as such) has no gum or binder in it, thus it would not fix to the paper fibers. Any subsequent attempt to rework an area introduced a new wash basin and gradient for the coffee to migrate, and gathered along the edge of the wet area, drying to a interesting stain mark. I happen to love this effect. I thought this is coolest way to elucidate a feature with ambiguous contour, in this case , the reflection of river bank in the water.
This pooling and migrating and concentrating of the coffee helped to create cloud like features in the sky. I left a cone-shaped void to hint the presence of a snow covered peak.
