Dalkey Quarry

I'm an enthusiastic plein-air painter. Not a very good one, though. Someone described me today as Speedy Gonzales - that's pretty accurate! I did add darks when I got home, but I feel that my right-hand-side foreground doesn't stand out enough in front of the cliff. Definitely a case of not deciding what my focus was going to be before I started painting. Is it the cliff? The tree on the left-hand side? The orange bushes? I couldn't decide and that shows in the painting. Actually, I can't even say I couldn't decide - the thought of a focal point, a "what", never even entered my mind. I loved the sweep of the path and the tree on the left, but I was also fascinated by the cliff looming large in front of me - that sense that the whole landscape was closing in on me. So, from that perspective, maybe I managed to paint what interested me in this scene?

An interesting exercise was to convert it to black and white - a dominance of mid-tones, with a bit of darks, and very little lights.