Pasture in the Evening fine art for sale

A PASTURE IN EVENING, a landscape painting for sale by the fine art gallery of realism, canvas size: 24” x 36”

This is a landscape where sheep are grazing in the evening on a hillside field. The hill rises up before the viewer. At he top of the hill, a line of trees diminishes towards the left, where a barn stands sheltered by a grove of trees. From the barn, a fence zigzags towards the front of the painting. Between the fence and the line of trees, a small number of sheep graze. To their right, as the hill slopes, a small pond can be seen. In the foreground grasses and ditch weeds can be seen surrounding the fence.

Usually, painting landscapes is an act of seeking places to paint. You drive through an area and look until you find something that grabs your attention. Sometimes it seems that you are even forcing the issue just to have something to paint. But once in a while, something grabs your attention and you know that its right even if you were not looking for it. That was the case with this sheep farm, if you can call it a farm with such a small number of sheep.

Evenings are a wonderful time to paint because the sun can create marvelous shadows and shapes as it dips into the west. It was that evening sun and it’s shadows upon the hill that caught my eye. But once I started painting the picture, there were so many other things that I found visually delightful.

I like the trees that run in a line at the top of the hill and how they diminish in size as they run into the distance. I like their shapes. I also like the trees that are scattered around the hill. They vary in style, as does the way they are painted. I like the sheep. I didn’t know whether they would turn out well but I captured their likeness in a way that I wanted. I like the barn and how it resides in the shadow of the grove of trees.

I like the pond on the right. I like the deep richness of its color and the light trail of plant material on its surface. And I like the way the light and shadows define the shape of the hill.

I parked along the side of a county highway and stood in a ditch to paint this picture. The traffic wasn’t bad but there was a steady flow of cars returning home from work. In the beginning, the grasses and weeds were not that high and the fence was very defined. But I knew that by the time I got to the foreground, they would be higher. Also, when I started, the sheep were very wary of me and stood quite far from where I was painting but by the time I had reached the middle ground and was ready to paint the sheep, they had become familiar with my set up and were wandering closer.

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