Beith Old Church with Surrounding Trees Oil

Framed by me, the artist, this piece is ready to hang.

At the centre of this oil painting on board I reference an old church in Beith that dates back to the 1500s. This painting derives from a drawing in one of my sketchbooks I did some years earlier from higher ground in the town. From that position you are looking roughly North-West towards the moorland of Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park (the hills in the distance of my picture) beyond which you find the shores of the lower reaches of the Clyde and the town of Largs and heading up the river from there, Skelmorlie, Wemyss Bay, Gourock, Greenock etc. Like other paintings of mine this one has been ‘completed’ more than once. The stronger colours and impasto apply to the foreground. The heavy foliage of the trees (beech and sycamore by the appearance of them) light illuminating some of the leaves, is done with dabs of oil paint, wet on wet. I have noticed that across at least some species of trees the leaves in high summer are generally of a darker green on top and a lighter green on the underside. Dashes of bright light and varying intensities of colour appear on a tree with foliage. Strong light bouncing off the shiny surface of a leaf, or shining through the body of the leaf or branches blown upwards by the wind revealing the lighter undersides of the leaves, for these reasons and no doubt for others a tree can present as a complex arrangement of light, shadow and colour. I take note of these things as an artist should. Artists ought to look hard. They are observers and much of art comes down to being able to see, not in an ordinary sense but in the sense of actively, consciously observing and taking note of what is seen. The artist Paul Cezanne said of the founder of Impressionism, Claude Monet, that he was ‘just an eye, but my god, what an eye!’ I think that there is richness to this impressionist picture and I feel that it successfully conveys the sense of vibrancy you get when you see a mass of foliage pulsating in the heat of high summer.