A Painting a Day for 30 Days – Day #6

Veld Fire

Day six in the painting a day challenge! This daily painting was inspired by a sketch but evolved very differently to how I thought it would. I painted this with a very limited palette (I had left my paints behind) and so I didn’t have the darker blues (I added them in later) I did have red, however,  and I had Africa on my mind.

I thought as I was painting the face, it looked very African and I started painting a lions mane around the face and body. The lions mane turned into grass which reminded me of the open plains (or veld)  in South Africa. As I was using a bit of red, this carried the red brush strokes into what was now the field. It was then that I saw the fire and built it up. I was struck by how the psychology of the figure was somehow related to the fire and brought fourth questions about the nature of the figure, her psychology and her surrounding landscape.

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