It was quite an interesting day for painting.  The weather forecast predicted it was going to rain.  However,  morning was very foggy then it turned into scattered light showers and strong wind.  By the late afternoon, bright sun was shining and it looked like it was another day.

I set up my easel in the morning close to my car looking at the Stonington downtown view.  It was a complex architectural structure with mansard houses and ledges.  There were many repeated structures, similar roof tops, similar style windows.  For example, the red building has at least 15 windows, thats way too many to even count.  I tried to simplify as much as possible, moving the buildings around, removing repeating windows and borrowing structures from near by buildings to vary the shapes of each building.  It was much harder to decide which structures to keep and which ones to leave out.

Egon Schiele’s landscapes, specially his architecture drawings and paintings has been my inspiration for a long time.  He is a master of manipulating line and space.  His buildings are never completely closed, he always finds a way to leave open lines so that the surrounding space can flow seamlessly into the buildings.   I looked for one of his drawing  Alte Häuser in Krumau, 1914 which helped me quite a bit today to simplify my drawing.  Using the same inspiration, I decided to use the same color for all the buildings to avoid blocks of multiple colors.   However, there was a need to introduce another color to counteract with many horizontal white shapes, so I decided to paint the vertical right hand side building to a darker blue shape.  I kept my color palette limited with just enough variation to keep the painting interesting.