Where I live in Central Texas, old houses are plentiful, especially on land that has been repurposed for oil or gas production. A well-built house made of wood will stand empty for many years before it succumbs to weather erosion.

First it loses its paint. Then the wood begins to age in the hot Texas sun to a lovely brown or gray patina. It may lose sections of its roof, windows break, boards may tear loose in the wind. Eventually the house starts to sag on its moorings.

Like many artists, I have a fondness for old houses, and while I rarely paint landscapes, I decided to paint one in abstract, using my primary color palette – pyrole red, primary yellow, ultramarine blue and thalo blue, plus black and white. I found an old house that had not begun to lose its roof or siding and set it on a lake much like where I live on Lake Tonkawa. [image error] Yes, it’s there on the left but only roughly defined.

  [image error] Now it’s shaping up. As I’ve mentioned before, when a nonrepresentational abstract painting begins to “look like something” real, it’s not easy to avoid leaning toward that reality. It’s even harder when working with a photograph of an actual place or thing. 

[image error] That started happening here, yet I don’t want a realistic landscape. Easier said than done.

I decided to allow it to be itself to a large extent, but I wanted to avoid adding details that would render it fully realistic, and to make the surrounding landscape abstract. So I smudged the trees and house in the background. [image error]

I also splashed abstract shapes in the upper right and in the tree at left. Then I continued working back and forth between abstract and realism. [image error]

At this next point I thought it was finished, [image error]

but you’ll notice in the final version that I added faint white vertical strokes in the water and on the house to balance the black ones and to lead the viewer’s eye around the finished painting.

From a simple red, yellow, blue palette, so many options exist. In case you missed earlier posts, here are the 3 nonrepresentational paintings from this palette: [image error] [image error]  [image error]

Note: some of the color shifts you see, from warm to cool, are due to photography — snapping a quick photo in my living room instead of taking it out to the studio.

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