Neighborhood Parking Lot oil painting

An oil painting of a city parking lot on a cloudy summer day is available through the Fine Art Gallery of Realism

NEIGHBORHOOD PARKING LOT, canvas size: 24” X 36”

A cityscape of a parking lot on a random, cloudy, summer day, where a scattering of cars are spread around the lot. Behind the lot are the parking lot fence and a row of older houses. These houses are shrouded by the residential trees. On the far left, the access lanes and a residential road run parallel to each other.
Painting cloudy weather is a completely different situation than the usual plein air work painted on sunny days, usually in the mornings and evenings. The drama that a rising or setting sun brings to a setting is gone and the artist is left to find other sources of drama, either through color or mood. A good, cloudy day can provide a nice sense of gloom but in the Midwest, those kinds of days do not appear very often. Summer is the best time to plein air paint and many of those days are sunny. You have to pick and choose the right days or hope for a summer with a heavier than normal amount of overcast days.

In this setting, I liked the large trees and the way they hovered over the houses. These are old, Victorian houses with two stories on them and attic space above that. Still, these trees make them look small. It took quite a while to paint the trees. There is quite a lot of greenery there as the neighborhood is an old one and the fauna has had decades to grow. I also like the scattered cars in the parking lot. The lot belonged to a grocery store and I would find myself at the mercy of the store traffic and the not so random patterns of parking used by the store’s customers.

Originally, I had hoped for a gloomier day with a certain amount of atmospheric haze to create some depth but this happens too rarely and as a painter, I can’t expect them. I did get a number of rain showers. During those, I sat in the back of my van as the rear door proved to be a blessing as a rain shield. Even though the cloudy weather was more elusive than I had hoped, I still find nice touches within the painting that were created by the lightly overcast days. Light barely appears upon the hoods and windshields of the cars and upon exposed patches of pavement, especially a small flash of illuminated street in the distance to the left.

Parking lots would continue as a theme of mine as the cars provide contrasts in color, shape and line for me as well as provide an alternative to people, who are much more elusive when I attempt to paint them.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting