One thing I came to appreciate from our recent trip to
Corydon and Harrison County, Ind., are the intricate elements that compose pastoral scenes.
I've been on this earth quite a few years now, and certainly I've driven past countless pastoral landscapes. I just never took the time to appreciate them the way I did when I was in Harrison County at the end of June and in early July.
Maybe it was because I'd seen how oil painter Linda Kay Shoults found fulfillment in preserving such scenes in her work. Or the fact that she lived on a large enough acreage that she was able to enjoy these scenes each and every day.
But I was taken by the simplicity and serenity of the sundry grasses and trees, the hay crops, and the expansive fields and occasional grazing horse or two. And even something as simple as a fence spanning a rolling hill, or the dramatic early-morning and late-evening shadows.
They all captured my attention and gave me pause for thought and inspiration to compose, maybe not in the dynamic way an oil painting might deliver. But I'm reminded that many oil painters get their inspiration from photographs.
You'll recognize the multiple shots of the same scenes in many of the photos below, but I present them anyway because they were captured at different times of the day.
Above and below: Ironically, I made these two photos the morning of June 30, an hour or so before I saw the exact same scene in one of Linda Kay Shoults' paintings (the image leading off the post on Part IV of this series) on exhibit at the Harrison County Arts artisan center later that day. When I saw her painting, I smiled, appreciating that we both saw art in this composition and expressed it in our own ways. In post-processing, I made two versions of my photo, the original (below) on which I then applied a crop (above). I like both, and I go back and forth on which I prefer. Above and below: These shots, taken just a few moments apart, show slightly different sections of the same sunsetting scene on the horse farm of Jim Hays and Linda Kay Shoults. I made these with my iPhone 13 Pro, and the only "edit" I made on the photos was to pull up shadow detail on the landscape area. I was amazed that the iPhone could deliver this high quality of a representation of the sun setting behind the trees on the horizon.
No comments:
Post a Comment