"Lafayette Square" in Progress

"Lafayette Square" 16x20 oil on panel

       The image above is the beginning of my most recent studio painting. I started it a couple of days ago and have only worked on it a couple of hours at a time. This is the struggle period and I am still changing a lot of things. There is a great deal of the peachy colored under painting showing through and it is not helping me at this point. I will be better able to proceed when I get that rather orange patch on the right worked over. I am concentrating mostly on the light and shadow right now and getting the scale relationships worked out.

        I conceived this painting last September while on one of my sketching and photo taking walks downtown. Lafayette Square is the park directly across from the front of the White House. The huge Second Empire building in the painting is the Old Executive Office Building ( now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) and it is to the right of the White House. Mark Twain once called it the ugliest building in America. I don't know about that but I can tell you it is a complicated one to paint. I must be careful not to get pulled into the details of it!

       The time of year is September and the oppressive heat and humidity of the summer have begun to lift making the sky appear an aqua blue and the light, still filtered by the atmosphere, bathing the city in a warm, golden glow. That is why I chose such a warm color for the underpainting.  I have roughly sketched in some figures and I will be choosing those figures from my quick sketches of people downtown. Below is a page of those "city people" sketches. Check back in a couple of days to see which ones I choose.