Four Trees

“Four Trees” was my first oil painting, and it’s based on the southern entrance of Chapin Park in Wichita, KS that is located behind the Starlite Drive-In. This view is from the south entrance; if you go there you’ll see that there are actually five trees, not four. But five trees would have been too much for the painting.

I created this piece to emphasize the feeling of peace, solace, and serenity of Chapin Park during the wintertime. I think a lot of people feel helpless and overwhelmed by harsh winter landscapes, but those times are when I believe hope and the promise of better days truly flourish. This is my favorite park in Wichita. It’s a place I go to every day for lunch during the workweek and where I do a lot of my creating.

I didn’t want a lot of detail in this piece. There are instances where I think emphasizing the blades of grass and adding a touch more realism would have been necessary, but not this time. I chose to omit several rules of nature, such as shadows and atmospheric brightening, but at the same time maintaining the feeling of diffused lighting from a cloudy day. All I wanted was the foreground and a single hill in the background with a road curving off canvas.

I did a couple of sketches of the entrance and completed the painting entirely from my studio to ensure that the piece was properly filtered through my eyes.