The idea for this painting came to me while I was looking out at the sea from the cottage window. Suddenly I realised – why go far to look for something when there’s something fascinating right there on the shore? The alders became the subject of this oil painting. I painted it in summer 2025. The use of colour in this painting is interesting – among other things, I used red in the alder trunks.
I painted the alders so that the light blue sky and the sea served as the background. I thought it was enough for the background to be very simple, since the leaves of the trees work well as effects of light and shadow. The different shades of blue don’t separate the sky and the sea in the background.
Above is the almost finished painting. In the finished painting I faded out that dark branch from the lower part of the right-hand alder’s trunk. In the finished painting you can clearly see how the blue sky and sea and the yellow leaves create green leaves in different shades.
What happened with this painting was that I painted brown onto the tree trunks before the layer underneath had dried. As a result, the top layer of paint started to crack.
This “accident” made the tree trunks look really interesting. If you zoom in on the picture below, you can see the cracking.
Maybe you can also imagine the alder leaves trembling gently in the wind?
