I make paintings of the wilderness and in cities and little towns before dawn that bring to life that awe-filled mystery of being alive on this planet.
I have a childhood friend who used to live on a spring fed river on the west coast of Florida until the most recent hurricane made that impossible. In winter, the river is warmer than the air, and the surface is covered with mist. This was on a tributary called Baird Creek just after sunrise. I have always wanted make a painting of it. Here is how I approached it:
Sometimes I use a single color as the ‘primatura‘ or first coat, but because the light changed so much, I made a variated background that was kinda sorta close to what was in the scene.Then I made a rough but fairly detailed drawing using alcohol markers. This is usually when I realize what I have gotten myself into.Here I’m just beginning to paint over the drawing, filling in the dark areas and beginning to indicate where the ripples in the water are.A first pass at filling in the trees and the foliage. This felt very crude – although it was a necessary step, of course – but it became clear that the area where the light hit the water and the way it behaved at the edges of the pool, had to be clear.
A little more work on the water and mist, and the trees in shadow. There were multiple attempts to improve this, with occasional diversions to other paintings to clear my eyes.
Here’s the final painting. As it got closer, each stroke would make a big difference, and also require a lot of clarity to lay down. I’ve started to appreciate how the earlier work makes the final touches possible.
My wife Melinda Tidwell and I went to an opening with some of my work in Tulsa and stopped for dinner in Clayton, NM. The next table was some ranch hands on their night off, and it seemed such an arresting image to me that I decided to make a painting of it.
I started out this one with a sketch over a light ochre ground using felt markers to indicate what was what.Next I applied a thin glaze of paint of a mix of burnt umber and ochre over all, then started putting in something closer to the shadow value here and there.This looks kind of terrible, but it helps to roughly lay out something close to the paneling and the doors and the floor.More work touching everything with a first pass to see how things are coming together. Each time I lay in a first pass it gives me an idea of what I’m in for…
Closer, but still a long ways to go. Everything will be painted at least twice again before it’s finished.
Here’s the final painting. The figures were worked on a ton, and the walls, as well as the chairs, foreground and floor were darkened and clarified.
I went and visited with an old friend at his house in Vermont a few years ago, and got up about 3am one night and drove around. Vermont is an especially beautiful place, and I love the little villages spread throughout the countryside. This painting is of a neighborhood in Vergennes, about 4:30 in the morning.
I find that I approach the technique for each painting differently. This had lots of different areas so I didn’t apply an overall primatura, or color undercoat, as I often do. I instead drew with pencil and marker to indicated what went where first. Next I applied a thin glaze of paint in the foreground and sky, and darkened the trees. It just started to go from day to night. This is more of an underpainting, now.More thin paint; a darker sky and road, the trees starting to move towards their final color. A little more picking out of details. It’s important to not get discouraged at the mess the painting looks like for these middle stages! Music helps…The sky was too light so i went in and brought it way darker. More areas have been painted for the first time; the overall tonality is close, but everything is still pretty crude. I lost the outline of the trees when I repainted the sky so I went in and drew them in with marker so I could find then again.
More work on pretty much area, although it still feels pretty rough. There are painters who I admire who pretty much finish one area as they move around, but I can’t do that. I need to tweak and evaluate the effect everywhere else as I feel my way around.
A pretty big readjustment. The sky was too purple, so i grayed it down, and also tweaked the house colors and the foreground. Around here I started another painting and left this up to ponder on for a while…Here’s the final painting. I went in to each little area and focused on clarifying it, then moved on to another. Now, finally, it feels more like it did when I saw it that night.
This is from a walk in the Sangre de Christo Mountains above Santa Fe just as the winter day was ending. I started this in the winter of 2021 and only recently finished it here in Portugal. The sun was just setting, and illuminating only the top half of the aspens. The scene was reminiscent of a couple of paintings by Neil Welliver, who is an artist hero of mine. It took a long time to finally feel like I finished this piece. Here are the steps along the way – kind of a long road.
This is a the sketch over a grey blue primatura, with some notations for where the sun would hit and the dark patches on the aspens trunks. You could see the mountain peaks lit by the sun behind the stand of aspens. I indicated that light, and then started working left to right on beginning to put in the aspens.This is a lot of work later, but only the merest beginning still! Around here was when I realized how big a job this would be.This is quite a bit later, but the painting still feels kind of crude and not ‘there’ yet.
Around here I decided to see how it would feel with the falling snow, and this is where the painting was when we moved to Portugal. When it arrived with everything else in the shipping crate, I put it up in the studio once the studio was finished and would look at it every time I came in.
Here the foreground is more filled in and it feels more like a place. I had been putting branches in the distant trees a little whimsically, thinking how much would it matter if I made them up? But at this point they seemed really phony to me, so I painted some sections out and then put them back, paying more attention to what was there. There were little gaps and irregularities that I had missed that I them painted in.The sky is lighter in places here, and in addition to making the crazy branches in the back more accurate to what was there, the highlights on the snow covered mountains are also more accurate. Here’s the final painting. The falling snow above the line of sunlight needed to be brighter, and the snow falling below that more blue. Lots of little tweaks here and there before it felt finished, three years later!
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.
Jonathan Keeton Artist Blog 