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Sixth Happy Garden painting is even more tranquil

I adore stone arches, I find them intriguing, particularly when they are in garden walls and have a tempting view beyond.

So I wanted the sixth Happy Garden painting to feature an arch in the wall of a courtyard garden but also a shaped raised stone walled pond that would be somewhere that the viewer would want to sit and peer into. The water in this pool is particularly enigmatic since it doesn’t seem to have any fish or plants in it, but I think anyone in this courtyard garden would want to check what they can see below the surface before wandering on up the steps to the delights of the garden glimpsed beyond.

Or maybe just sit at the waters edge and peer into the liquid depths of it, for as long as it gave them pleasure to do so.

The colour scheme for this painting is basically yellow.. the yellow of the stonework, and the yellow of the flowering plants and the climbing roses growing at the side makes this a pretty painting with no strong tones in it. I enjoyed making the shape of the raised pond to an eight sided one with the angled edges rather than a plain round one although the rounded shape in the archway softens the angular lines. The red plant between the arch and the raised pool anchors them together and creates their inter connection.

The pool is painted in sharp focus but the rest of the painting is more hazy, making the pool and water the focal point.

The painting is called “Tranquil waters” and is painted in acrylics on canvas measuring 16 x 12 inches, so one of the smaller of these set of paintings, and I loved fitting in all the details of this painting, working from a couple of photos but also changing some of the details and making up parts of it totally from my imagination, this one has a lot of artistic licence in it too!

I think its a very pretty picture, and love the turquoise green of the water, which again doesn’t reflect the sky too much as these paintings are about the enigmatic mysterious water and not the reflections of the sky above it.