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MEDIUM: Watercolor on Paper
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SIZE: Image Size: 29" x 21"
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STATUS: Sold
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ACCOLADES: Past Presidents Award and among only 60 accepted in the Juried Tennessee Watercolor Society 2012 Exhibition
"Jesus Saves" is done in watercolor, depicting a barn I have often photographed on a nearby rural backroad. It has so many fabulous textures - the old barnyards, rusted metal panels as siding, rusty hinges, an overturned water tub, a field of wildflowers. I could hardly wait to get started.
As I sketched the barn on the heavyweight watercolor paper. I was bothered by the lack of a "focal point." I thought of adding a farm animal (horse or cow), but that didn't seem interesting enough, and might detract from the barn too much. It finally came to me - what I call "Christian barn graffiti" would be perfect! It's quite common here in the rural South to see hand-scrawled religious messages - even lines of scripture - painted on old barns. Lettering naturally captures your eye in a painting, but positioning this graffiti in my painting was critical. I hand-wrote the words "Jesus Saves" on a clear piece of plastic, at a size in proportion to the barn, and moved it around on my pencil sketch to determine where the words should be added. The lettering needed to be logical to the painting, not covering hinges or going across a door opening, and not taller than a person would stand to paint them. And the words needed to work with the overall design. The left end of the barn seemed ideal, especially if I simplified the background trees so the strong diagonal of the roof angle would strongly point in that direction. In addition, the water tub - as a singular element, standing out lighter color than its background - would balance the graffiti on the right half of the scene.
I painted Jesus Saves with only 3 paint colors, Holbein Royal Blue, Holbein Permanent Red, and Winsor & Newton Yellow. All the greys, rusty colors, and greens of the grass and trees were mixtures of these colors; the only place I used the paint just as it came out of the tube was for the yellow wildflowers in the foreground. It was a challenge which I found really intriguing."
