My initial inclination is to paint what I see and I tend toward literal representation. So my first pass at this image was the painting above, trying to match the color and imagery of the scene in the photo. I wasn't able to push the hills back with the color. They kept popping forward. So I laid down a light glaze over the hills to mute it. While doing that I lost the lightness of the hills.
The second time I painted the scene, I tried to simplify the forms and abstract the shapes, but kept close with color.
This third pass, I held on to basic abstract, shape and value but gave up on literal color.
