Salento, a valley

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Salento, a valley, watercolour on paper, c. A3

Salento, a valley - detail

The landscape is vast, uncompromising and rich, and painting it can seem a hopeless task, like fitting a whale into a handbag.

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Plate, book, table, window

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Plate, book, table, window, oil on card,  15.6  x 15 cm unavailable

This was painted back in March, and put aside. It still works for me. It`s survived a few months. 

Still life is about a sense of place. But the kind of place is smaller than in landscape. And one has more power to decide what goes in that place. A still life painter has a degree of control that the landscapist lacks. 

A reference in this is Morandi, whose pictures are sometimes interpreted as miniature cityscapes, with towers and blocks

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The dunes, a rise

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The dunes, a rise, oil on card, 20.5 x 25 cm

There's an area where the genre of landscape shades into still life, and I enter it here with these recent dunes pictures.

 I'd initially been interested in the dunes for their grand sweeping shapes, but what now engages me is the close up ground view, of dry twisted thorn shrubs, strange succulents, stones, scratchy grasses and their shadows.

To this end, I'm using very small brushes for the first time in years.

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