Evolution of a Painting

So this is how it always begins, a large blank space. This painting will be an extension of an earlier painting in a vertical direction, so the composition is to some extent determined by what

is already below. The scene is a door in the Bynum Mill with two birds, a blackbird and a pigeon, looking through a metal grate at a dog in the sunlight (an homage to our dog who passed away recently). This new part will be the broken wall that you can see above the door, other parts of the building in the middle ground, and trees and sky above. The beautiful birds of the world, cardinals, bluebirds, gold finches, etc, will be perching and fluttering in the vines and branches. At least that's what I think it will look like.

After laying the two panels out on the floor and mapping the lines that will cross the border, I went to my photos of the mill to get ideas of what the broken wall and background would look like. The piece will be a mix of structure and chaos, which is what interests me about the subject. How does something so structured and strong slowly return back to the landscape?

A lot of work was done in terms of laying out the composition and creating the space. It is at once more open and more closed than the previous panel. More open in the sense that there is an actual exit from the constriction of the building, but closed in there there is more actually happening in the piece. It will be a tightly packed and complicated painting, but it will be a good contrast with the monotonously repeated bricks of it's companion.