Last September my wife and I, looking to get away from the house for a few hours, after the loss of our dear, long time companion, Peaches, took a drive up to Suwanee River State Park. The park is located in northwest Florida, in the Big Bend Area, in Hamilton County. The park is associated with a lot of Florida’s history. Andrew Jackson led troops through the area in 1818 looking for Indian strongholds. In 1863 Confederate forces constructed earthworks along the river to protect a railroad bridge near what was once the town of Columbus to guard against Union troops marching from Jacksonville. The Confederate army prevailed during that encounter, turning back Union soldiers in the Battle of Olustee in 1864. Columbus is gone now but a cemetery still remains nearby.
My wife and I walked along the banks of the river and picnicked there in the early afternoon. I found some good vantage points to take pictures. Those pictures have been stored away on my computer since then, but I recently looked back through them and found a few promising shots. One stood out. It was a view of the river, past some baldcypress trees, their bases swollen from a long association with the water of the river bank. It is a peaceful scene, looking out from the shadows of overhead tree canopy into the sunlit river as it slowly meanders out to the Gulf of Mexico. I think it will make a good painting.
My first step was to work out some value sketches and see if I could improve the composition a bit. The darks of the bald cypress trees, the foliage mass in the upper left and the cypress knees at the bottom formed a natural frame for a center of interest in the area to the left of the cypress trees – the light area of the sky and its reflection in the river. The lights of the sky and water, plus the mid tones of the background trees seemed to balance the darks nicely.
Although I liked the idea of the bald cypress trees, I wasn’t happy with the amount of space between the two trees. I felt the trees needed to be closer together or one needed to be eliminated – or more trees needed to be added. Also, some changes needed to be made to the cypress knees at the bottom. The rightmost cypress knee in particular seemed out of place and demanded too much attention.
In my first value sketch (Sketch 1) I eliminated one of the bald cypress trees. That seemed to help some, but it still left me a little dissatisfied. I also removed the cypress knee furthest to the right at the bottom. That helped also.
Then, something else struck me. The picture seemed divided nearly in half by the horizontal line of the river bank. My feeling was that the river bank had to be moved either up or down.
I then tried another, similar composition (Sketch 2) but raised the river bank up higher, to almost two thirds of the way up. I also added two cypress trees back in to the composition, and grouped them closer together, but with unequal distances between them. Having a grouping of trees increased the mass of darks on the right, and I felt it looked better than having just one tree. Having only one tree seemed distracting to me. The larger dark mass felt better. The higher river bank also seemed to be an improvement.
I did a third sketch, this time moving the line of the river bank downward to about a third of the way from the bottom. I liked that also.
The question now was – river bank higher or lower? At this point I’m leaning toward the higher river bank but I’m going to have to think on it.
A last consideration in the composition is adding a focal point or center of interest. I need to add something to draw the eye to. Kayak or birds – or something else? In addition to these questions, there are other considerations that will affect how this painting looks in the end. I’ll discuss them in the next installment.