It is rare I paint a landscape and it tends to be because the image I have seen captures my imagination. I have found the greens can become overwhelming. If I do paint a landscape it will either be more urban or it will be because I am trying to capture our garden and it's pond. To paint our garden is a fight I will sometimes have with myself and I expect to continue to try and capture it when it becomes overwhelming to do so again. I even have a picture of our garden having suffered a very sleepless night and I had a mad 10 minutes of painting to get the image out onto a canvass. I would describe that painting as more abstract.
A far more successful landscape I created was one I did during lockdown and none of us could travel and go on holiday. I remembered images of paintings I had seen on holidays in Greece and Spain and the brightly coloured flowers that grow over buildings. I decided to create my own painting so we would have a reminder of our own holidays. The painting I created took a while for me to finish as it was complex and has lots of small flowers of different colours and types going over an archway. The sky is blue and the buildings are white. This painting I hung in one of our bedrooms and I always smile when I look at it as it does remind me of sunny warm places.
I also created a local urban landscape painting, inspired by the sunset sky that I had witnessed. The sky is a mixture of pinks and greys and the buildings and trees are fading but can still be seen, as well as a car with its headlights on. I tend to use more of an impressionist style when I paint landscapes.
I prefer to paint seascapes to landscapes, blue is by far my favourite colour and seascapes gives me an opportunity to use lots of blues. I created a painting I call Spanish Blue from a striking image my husband had taken of the sea just as the sun was going down. You cannot see the sun itself in the sun or sea, but the reflection of white it is creating across the deep blue sea. I wanted to paint this image for a long time, but kept on avoiding doing it as I was not sure I could capture what was there. When I finally created the painting, I was immensely proud of it. It has really capture a likeness of the original photo, something I do not often set out to do, but in this case I felt the image required it.
The most recent seascape I created was of an image my husband and I often see when we visit New Brighton, of the red cranes set against the river Mersey. I like industrial landscapes, they can have a beauty of there own, and this one in particular is set against a backdrop of a mighty river. In the seascape I created, again using an impressionist style, the cranes are shown in the distance.
These paintings are rare for me, they come from images that really capture me.
Ruth Breen