Autumn 2015

Autumn 2015

8 x 10, Oil on canvas panel, completed 10/2015.

This year I wanted to study the season well as it may be my last in NJ.  I found out the hard way my fingers don't move the way I want them to below 60 degrees F, so I only got one small oil sketch with my box.  I didn't have my box perfected, nor time to sketch outdoors frequently outside of summer, until this year.  This finished painting instead was composed from memory, putting to use my observations.  I am very pleased with the brushwork, although I admit it could be a bit more realistic.  I sometimes get carried away with color.  With that said, I prefer a bright, cheerful autumn to a somber one.

I used the J. P. Ridner medium (4/9 copal varnish, 4/9 oil, 1/9 beeswax) for this.  The Ridner medium may have been the medium Frederic Edwin Church used.  It seems quite likely to me this is what he used for oil sketches.  The effect I got in the branches in the large tree on the left can be seen in a number of his sketches in the Cooper-Hewitt.  There are obstacles to this theory, though.  The Ridner medium is heat sensitive and works best at room temperature (the paint puddles but does not run on a hot day), as at room temperature it behaves similarly to megilp (it was used historically as a superior substitute for megilp).  I get the best Church-like brushwork when I work on an oil primed board given a thin oil-out (best if the oil is cut half and half with turpentine), and the temperature in the 70s. The proportion of the medium in the colors could be altered to adapt to the weather, and the resin concentration in the varnish also has an effect.  So I need to experiment more.  The Ridner medium performs marvelously when used thinly without an oil-out, as well, as Church would have used it in studio pictures.  And there is good reason to believe Cropsey was also using it in his earlier paintings. But I'll post my theories on Hudson River School technique in greater elaboration sometime in a future post.  You can find the original recipe for the Ridner medium as an improved formulation of megilp with copal in Ridner's Artist's Chromatic Handbook which can be had for free in the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/artistschromatic00ridn .  The proportions I give are what he means (we artists have never been very quick with math).