Today I went to Parque Llano, Oaxaca's singular, well loved & humming urban park, to look for something to paint with my student Judy. We sat in the shade on a bench and painted this interesting door in an alcove of the building across the street.
This is a bit of a static subject but we found ways to make it interesting. I used a lively pastel pallet that bore only a slight resemblance to what I saw there, I used color more to distinguish parts of the composition than to report the truth.
Much of old Oaxaca was build with cantera stone, a locally quarried light green stone that is luminous with a near magical presence, both light and dead serious at once. So I at least wanted to mix a color that gave a clue to the cantera stone.
Of particular interest was the horizontal line at the top of the building, crossed with the line of the phone pole. It sets up a super basic, very dynamic composition that brings the sublime simplicity of Mondrian to mind.
I was really happy to leave the cars in the foreground as simple contours -- they were the coldest things in the view, so I let them linger as cold white shapes in a warm world.
We gave ourselves just enough time to set up the composition and block in color, without getting obsessive over the details of the scene.
