Oil Painting

30 x 22 inches

A street scene in France. Recently I reworked some paintings where I felt the big-shape composition was good but the light, color and some of the small shapes were not. The two images above are the before-and-after...top before and lower image after. Sometimes I only rework a certain area, such as making the sky or sunlit sides of buildings lighter...but here I reworked everything, also making some of the dark shapes darker, redefining a lot of the small shapes such as the doorways and shuttered windows, and re-positioning most of the figures. I rework probably fewer than 5% of my paintings...I like to go from start to finish in one painting session, but sometimes one has to admit that a painting could be better with a little more work. With the above painting, I spent one day painting it and another reworking it...the 2 days were roughly a year apart.