Unfortunately, I can’t remember which ones!

In this series, I’m painting over old pieces that no longer have relevance and so they come with their own underpainting. This is another 6×8″ canvas.

I’ve done a lot of finger-blending with this piece, taking off surplus paint with a piece of towel roll that further exposes the underpainting. I liked the earlier representation of the hills with the lighter hill separate and central, so I’m going to see if I can find that again. The surreal drag of pink across the fence has vanished too, but may be retrievable. In fact, the fence has become an odd kind of shrubbery, which might just be earning its keep.

There’s a bit of biblical lightening of our darkness going on with this piece. The photo below was taken from a distance to see if that reduced the camera effect, and then cropped.

I want to say that’s better, but I think I’m fooling myself. I’ll try again tomorrow with a different setting aimed at preserving the darks instead of trying to brighten them up.

This is the phone’s Dramatic setting which, if you didn’t know about the blues and yellows, might be ok but, well – blues and yellows.

This is the painting with its new paint layer based on the camera’s dramatic take.

This, I think, is where the human eye and brain see what they expect to see and don’t try to drill down to the irrelevant minutiae of texture because the whole is, to quote Gestalt psychology, greater than the sum of its parts. They were particularly interested in the organisation of sensory perception, taking the view that this permitted processing of information as a whole rather than as its various parts. To me, this implies meaning is the overriding consideration, which seems likely to have better inherent survival value.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025