ART OF GEORGE WILLIAM VAN HUMBECK

To date this was the largest painting I've ever attempted. From the start in August of 2019 to completion in February of 2020 several other paintings had been started and finished. The idea of working on more than one painting at a time was new to me, but perhaps that has more to do with the nature of the oil paint medium. When I began "Into the Light" it was the first oil paint I had worked on in twenty years. Even then I think it is safe to say that my previous understanding of the medium was self taught. Now after much research including reading Ralph Mayer's "The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques" (I think it is a must for all painters, however, in spite of it being the sixth edition, I found it a little spare when it came to more contemporary materials) I decided to give myself a subject and a size that would afford me the opportunity to practise with some of the ideas and mediums I had never used before: a burnt umber underpainting, glazing, scumbling, alkyd resins like Windsor Newton's Liquin.

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Just a point of interest I would like to mention, you can never tell where your ideas will come from. This one was originated from a scene I saw at the end of a movie I was watching that showed a bright meadow silhouetting large trees. I must admit that much of the composition was worked out on the fly, but I was just too anxious to try oil painting again with some new techniques including Michael James Smith's helpful hints on how to paint moss.