Day Sixteen: Homestead by J Francis Murphy
Hello and welcome to day 16 of 100 days of tonalism.
Painted after - Homestead by J Francis Murphy, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel
Today's study is of 'Homestead' by J Francis Murphy.
At LAST we've arrived at a painting by J Francis Murphy! J Francis is one of my favorite all-time landscape painters and his work has been a big influence on my own painting.
In today's video I've read some biographical information from the site artsy so I will leave off from that here. J Francis is really an artist that I need to learn more about. I believe he is covered in the book; "a history of American tonalism" I haven't got to the section that mentions second-generation tonalists yet.
This work is very moving and moody. A trait that some of his work shares with George Inness. I ended up inserting this particular image because I had run into a issue of duplicate imagery even at this early stage in the series. By the way the reference that I got off the Internet is very tiny and lacking in detail. This was not overly bothersome since I'm working at the small size of 5 x 7," it would be more of an issue if I was working larger.
One of the great things about doing all of the studies in a small format, is that there are quite a few paintings that I only had very small reference images of. As a sidenote; this is the first series of paintings that I've done where I did not actually print out my reference imagery but instead used a digital photo frame. I really love working with that frame now and it's saving me a lot of money on ink and paper.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
A bit about 'Homestead' by J Francis Murphy. There's a lot going on in this painting. I imagine the original is quite a bit more complex than my simplified study. I was attracted to the intense red color in the trees which is mirrored on the ground. J Francis Murphy was an excellent painter of ground as you will note in his paintings and gets varied tones and textures there.
I'm quite happy with the way that this study turned out although I was a bit trepidatious at first due to its apparent complexity. As with most subjects I pursue, I just threw myself into the work and got after it. Notice that this painting has an interesting juxtaposition between greens and reds. It is a very complementary color scheme that is offset by the neutral sky. J Francis' sky is more neutral than the one I created but I felt I had to inject some additional color.
You never actually know what you're dealing with when you are working off images from the Internet. Also many paintings have been varnished and they tend to yellow over time.
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Original painting, Homestead by J Francis Murphy