Empty Chairs Evoke Emotions

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. One of my students showed me a photograph that she wanted to paint so we decided to work on it together. It held special memories for her so we couldn't deviate from the photo very much. With all the details in the flowers I thought it was important to keep the sky simple and choosing a blue gray helped to create a mood of a misty New England Day. Paintings should inspire thoughts or tell a story and, when I look at the two empty Adirondack chairs, I think of a couple enjoying a quiet peaceful time as they look out over their flower garden. Someone else may think of something else entirely such as loneliness or melancholy. The point is to get the viewer thinking about the painting.

With this many flowers, it is important that they work together the way they do in a real garden. To accomplish this, some of the flowers overlap, some bleed into each other with soft edges, and some are simple marks of color while others are more carefully detailed. It is important to visualize the entire garden before you start painting because it doesn't matter how well you paint a single flower, if it doesn't work with the rest of the garden it will command to much attention and be distracting. You can see how the flowers along the horizon line allow the sky to peak through. This creates a connection between the sky and the garden and ties the composition together. Painting the flowers up over the bottom of the chairs also helped with this. I kept the two chairs simple and you can't really tell if they are pointed toward the garden or the opposite direction. In my mind I left it for the viewer to decide.

The sky is a mixture of cerulean blue, violet and cadmium red. Burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue were mixed for the two chairs and the negative shapes around the flowers are olive green, perylene green and French ultramarine blue. I used all the yellows I have on my palette, lemon, cadmium, transparent, and yellow ochre for the flowers along with cobalt violet, cerulean blue, alizarin crimson, and cadmium red. The white flowers are unpainted white paper which had to be planned ahead for location and size. When you think your way through a painting and try to tell a story painting becomes more fun. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton