Ribatejo Morning

On By jonathankeeton

This is from an early morning walk near where we live in the Ribatejo in Portugal once morning just as the sun was coming up. This is the first painting I finished since landing in Portugal, but I approached it so stupidly that I wanted to show other paintings before going into how this one came into being.

I don’t really know what I was thinking. I was so anxious to start a painting that I didn’t really think enough about it. This is a marker drawing over a primatura on a 20″ x 30″ canvas. What I should have done was to get the sky at least close before doing this. Oh well.
Once the horse had left the barn, I then roughed in the sky. I was hoping that I could use transparent paint so I wouldn’t lose the drawing. That wasn’t going to happen, as I soon learned…
Something like this is what should have been done as an underpainting before I got any further. Really embarrassing, and a killer waste of time!
Okay, so now there is a sky of sorts there (not at all right though) and the branches are brought back over top so I have a sense of what is still to be done.
Now there’s a foreground of sorts. The sky has slowly started moving more towards where it will end up.
Some work on the foreground, and the beginning of adding a sense of light to the sky.

Here is the final painting, after a lot of back and forth noodling.

3 thoughts on “Ribatejo Morning”

  1. Catherine Craig's avatar Catherine Craig

    Jonathan, in my humble never-asked-for opinion, you are way too hard on yourself. (I hope this is a private email and I have not tapped into your blog).

    But I am writing for another reason. A (male) friend of Peter and I with a limited income (perhaps just social security) has lived in, loves and knows a lot about Portugal. I was telling a group of friends (who are also familiar with One Pass) about your morning emails of Portugal splendor and one friend asked if I would contact you and ask you what areas in Portugal might you suggest for low income living. He worries that the places he originally considered a while back might have gone up quite a bit.

    Your thoughts are most welcome. You are always making me quite envious. At times, I would love to move to another country, but alas, we have five grandchildren living nearby that we can barely leave for two weeks without missing them.

    Thanks,

    Catherine

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    1. Hi dear Catherine! You are welcome to give him my email: jonathan.keeton@gmail.com. Basically the coast has become much more expensive, and the farther inland you go, the cheaper it is – but more isolated, and fewer people speak English. I think the area north of Porto is really beautiful, and Guimarães is a pretty lovely city, but it’s also more like Northwest in terms of climate. We live about 50 minutes northeast of Lisbon in a teeny hamlet, of which there are lots here!

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