Village Green. Leonard Koscianski, 26″x42″, oil on canvas, 2016.
Village Green is a medium size painting in oils on canvas. Painted from the imagination, it is a horizontal composition where the perspective is exaggerated. The viewer looks down up close and straight out in the distance, where the headlights of cars can be seen on the winding road. The foreground has an early morning light while the background is still in darkness. This suggests a passage of time that parallels the movement into the distance. A woman is running along the road in the foreground, as blue jays fly in from the right. A man looks our his window. The severe simplicity of the houses and the curved space make this a surrealist painting.
The color scheme is dominated by the primary colors, red, yellow, blue, and green. This is Postmodern Art in that it borrows stylistic elements from styles, and artists from the past, such as Grant Wood, Giorgio de Chirico, and Edward Hopper, as well as the artist’s mentor Wayne Thiebaud. The illuminated sides of the houses, their roofs, and the road are under painted with pure white to create representational textures. Then the finished colors are glazed over this white base. This gives them a more luminous appearance than they would normally have. This can be appreciated better in person than in reproduction.