My son Martijn likes to travel the world. He does not need much of an excuse to pack his bag and leave for a short trip to visit a place he has not seen before. This scene is from a journey he made a few years ago, mosty using trains for transport. He visited several countries in the eastern parts of Europe and made lots of photographs for his own memory and he always kindly allows me to use these landscape photographs as reference for my watercolours and other artwork.
This time I was inspired by a view on Koper in Slovenia. There are not so many buildings visible in this scene but the mountains in the background make this an inspiring view. The church tower is a nice landmark here and I decided that this had to be my 'point of interest' - if possible. I have not been simplifying the view of the roofs and houses much, I guess my son had a high standing point when he made the photographs I used.
These buildings are built in a way that is not common in The Netherlands, so I had to concentrate well while painting them. Shadows, angles, roofs or streets are not what I am used to see in daily life so I cannot rely on my memory and have to work with my sketch - with lots of notes written on it - close by.
I have been painting this in two steps, the first step was wet-in-wet for the sky, the mountains and the 'details' in the background area, and the second step was wet-on-dry for the buildings, the trees between the buildings and the details.
Usually I paint the whole painting wet-in-wet first with details wet-on-dry and that works very well for most landscapes. This little town asked for another approach and I am pleased with the result.
More information can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
The conclusion of Advent is Christmas - of course. After the four Sundays of Advent, with more and more light coming into the world and my paintings I just had to paint Christmas as well. Because I had used my mothers old missal as the source of information for the Gospel readings of Advent, I turned to that book again. I found that sixty years ago there were Gospel readings for Christmas night, dawn and day. The readings for night and dawn follow each other, but the Gospel for Christmas day is very different from the stories we have been reading before and is not easy to translate to a landscape painting.
I chose to paint a landscape inspired by the Gospel reading of Christmas dawn.
Luke 2, 15 -16; "And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger." (source of the English text is www.kingjamesbibleonline.org)
As this scene is at dawn, there is much more light. The Star is supposed to be in the sky until Epiphany and shines brightly now. On the right side of the road are fields like those where the shepherds spent the night. They have left for Bethlehem, but the remains of their fires can still be found. On the left side of the road is a town like Bethlehem could have been and some fields that might be used for agriculture. Of course this landscape is imaginary, like the ones I painted for the four Sundays of Advent.
The sky still has some of the colour of the night, so I used indigo again, but the landscape is well lit and has much more colour.
This project was really nice to work on. Indigo is a great colour to work with as it is usable for all tonalities in a landscape painting. Adding more and more colour was also coming naturally as I have painted all five paintings in order within a few weeks time.
More information about my Advent project can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
