A New Painting: "Yellow Peak"

Yellow Peak, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.

This simple-looking painting gave me a great deal of trouble. One of my goals in my paintings is to have a convincing sense of light; what happened here was that I started off too dark, without enough light within the shadows. As I worked I got myself into a deeper and deeper mess; not only was the image too dark and devoid of a feeling of light and shadow, my floundering had caused an annoying amount of dust to stick to the panel, which then lifted and left white spots. 

The only sensible thing to do at that point, after 3 days of work, was to wipe it all off and start again. In this photo the parchment is still moist so it has loosened. When it dried completely, the surface was again flat and taut. It turned out to have been a very good decision: my second attempt was much much better because I had a clearer idea of the hues and values I was aiming for. 

Yellow Peak, detail

I also simplified the composition: there was originally an irregular band of red within the triangular shape. I decided that the painting was more effective with a clear demarcation of yellow and red. My only worry in doing this was that the image would separate into two parts, so I tried very hard to have the color intensities and values similar in the yellows and reds. I think it works....