KIEFERART FINE ART UP CLOSE

"Blending In"
Oil on canvas, 12" x 18"

$350 (US customers only) PURCHASE INFO

I had painted in this North Shore landscape, but wanted a figure in it (landscape painters usually wince at that, but then they're not me.). I didn't want the figure to be dominant, in fact, I was hoping to "blend" it into this peaceful, contemplative scene to some degree. I dug out a photo I had taken a few years earlier of a woman who had been intently watching a contestant at a fiddling contest in Andover, MN. She had exactly the absorbed expression that I thought might work well in this.

It was overcast and a bit foggy so the layers of distance in the land planes were more evident than they would have been otherwise. The quality and direction of the light on the woman in the photo was very different than that in my landscape, so I had to shift it so it would match. You might notice a bunch of purple lupines nestled among the rocks and greenery. To make the overall image cohesive, I used tints of that lupine color for highlights on the figure and everything else.

As a side note, at one point the lupines were much bigger (closer to the foreground) and left of where they are here. As I composed the figure into the scene, those purple flowers wound up right above the figure's head. She suddenly looked like Carmen Miranda, so I made them more distant and placed them farther right to correct it. It was pretty funny the way it was. I'll forever wonder if I should have left it that way.