First of 2015 - Forest City

Hello all.

My first success of 2015 is in.  I have just up loaded my new painting to deviant ART and it should now be available of sale.

http://v-j-bartlett.deviantart.com/gallery/

I titled this one Forest City and thought I'd use my blog post to explain some of the inspiration behind it.

I suppose that I got the initial germ for it years ago when I heard about this house that had been abandoned and by the time anyone thought to send in the bulldozers an oak tree had taken root in one of the upper rooms and was growing its roots into all the cavity walls.  House that was growing into a tree, if you will.

This information was filed away in a box marked 'interesting' in my brain and left on a shelf until I watched 'Hellboy II The Golden Army' about this time last year, when the imagination took down the box and opened it up.  I was really thinking about the fact that the bad Prince in that film had a point; we are destroying all the forests and we'll kill ourselves in the process.  That led into the thought, what if some of the human race could give up its greed and start trying to live along side nature again instead of fighting her?  My imagination grabbed that idea and started building this world were you wouldn't be able to tell what was forest and what was city because one was the other.

Forest City is the result.  The central 'tree' is actually a group of six trees that have been encouraged to grow into each other and all those round things with lights in them are giant sized oak apples that have been turned into rooms.  The reason it doesn't have a canopy is because it's out of 'shot'.  Trees that have grown into a house, or to be more exact a skyscraper.

I know that the being in the foreground is an elf but that bit was inspired by the accompanying painting in the Youtube video for the Heather Dale song 'The Fair Folk'.  (If you haven't listened to that song then it's well worth the time as the elves in that song aren't the friendly sort.)

That is that thing with artists, we very rarely have only one inspiration.  The background alone was the collective images of at least a dozen photos and paintings.  As to why it took me this long to finally have the painting done, well, that's life.  I had a couple of months to chew over the idea, then had to finish the projects that I'd already started, complete several commissions and then I was able to start on Forest City.  The sky alone took a week as it was a right royal bugger to do that colour shift from dark blue to light purple.  That took some experimenting as I've never tried something like that before.

It is one of the reasons I use acrylics, if I make a mistake I can paint over fairly easily and believe me that sky took some painting over.

That is the main advice I can give to new artists, if at first you don't succeed - paint over and try again.