Rhada looks flat

I got home from work tonight, and the painting looks "flat". On my drive home I was really looking at the sky and how the blues are so much brighter (the hue is more blue) close to you. The blues fade into a pale cerulean or even a light grey as the horizon recedes away. Today I stumbled upon the website of a Mass College of Art MFA graduate, Hannah Bureau.

From Inspiration

This is an image of one of her paintings (Hannah Bureau, "Wild Lake With Black Rock Bound", oil on canvas, 12"x12).

She was talking in her thesis about some of the same kind of concerns I am having. She resolved some of them through starting to really see and really consider how colors were acting in her canvases. Cools receding behind warms. Brights jumping out in front of more subdued colors. I am thinking it would be beneficial to me to start to think about how landscape painters dealt with the near and far away. So much of my color is saturated. It all sits on the surface. How can I create space, and play with what is expected? How can I play with what is near and far? Do I really understand the ways that these effects are created on the canvas? I am considering signing up for a 2-day portraiture class with Leo Neufeld. I find that the non-representational work I do is intensely informed by the figurative, more "realistic" work that I do.

Here's a black and white painting I'm working on tonight: