frooon

I've recently had a moment of clarity on why I like some of my paintings more than others, even if my technical ability never seems to be the problem; they severely lack 'atmosphere'.

While I'm happy with the paintings on a technical level, they fall flat emotionally and I don't have much interest in looking at them. I have a few ideas on why they turn out like this:

• I paint alla prima, so they might be lacking depth that comes from layers
• They lack variety in brush strokes (I tend to paint smoothly with small brushes)
• I use different values of the same mixed colour for large sections (e.g. backgrounds), leading to lack of variation
• They might lack movement, maybe painted 'stiffly