In this series, plein air painter and instructor Jeanne Mackenzie takes a look at new paintings by contemporary artists and points out why they succeed as painted images. This week, Richard Onica’s “Winter Morning.”
There is a nice balance of warm and cool in this winter scene. Even though the tree is subtle in hue, the lost edges of the foreground bushes and surrounding trees help to make it a defining focal point. The distant mountain adds a wonderful strong chroma that is not overpowering. It stays in the distance, as the artist has melded the sky and mountain edgework. The river lays down with the horizontal lines in its banks.
