On December 23, I drove to the Garden of the Gods to capture some of the white on the trees, and it was melting so fast, it was gone. Next time, I'll do a few from my window instead. The trees were still there, as were the red rocks, so I painted a few of them. I had tucked some tiny canvases in my pocket, as it was cold to start, and did a 4 x 6 inch of evergreens. Tis the season!
This was a wonderful gift, after driving to the Garden of the Gods to see the flocked trees, it really warmed up and I painted a little 6 x 8 of Pikes Peak and the foreground of Cottonwoods there on location in the Park. In December, there is always snow on Pikes Peak. Merry Christmas!
This is the one that has bothered me the most of all my paintings. It was a fabulously colorful scene with the rough rock formations, fall foliage along the river. I took many photos, and was thanking God I got to drive here. The painting even won "People's Choice" in a gallery show I did in Montrose in 2008. I didn't like the colors, and wanted to rework it, but didn't know how. Today, I just printed up a little 4 x 6 print of it, and started in. I added more brushwork, soft edges, and got the colors right! Finally, I'm pleased with the results. It just took me 2 years to learn.
These are the first 2 steps in a large painting (24 x 36)of a farm scene. On a trip up I-25 for work, a field of orange caught my eye, then I realized it was a pumpkin field (after Halloween) and the cows were eating what was left of the harvest. I first created a composition out of the scene by covering the canvas and sculpting out the images of the cows where I wanted them. The next step was adding the background, the primary cows and the foreground pumpkins. It still has some more fleshing out to do, but have approached this one in a little different way, and its been an interesting process.
This is another one I reworked late this summer (18 x 24 oil on canvas). I loved the scene, its from a photo I took at the lavender field at Los Poblanos near Albuquerque from 2003 where we visited and stayed for a few days. I had it hanging on my wall, and the longer I looked at it, realized I wanted to make it more interesting. It seemed flat, and I wanted more texture and depth. I include both versions, the new one is above on the left.
It's almost the end of the year that I said I would paint every day for a year. Well, I haven't. But I've painted more than I have in past years because I've had a goal, and I've gotten better at painting. This isn't even a painting. It's an ink sketch, a quick sketch. I've sorted through my sketchbooks in the last few days, and its been an interesting history lesson, going back to 1993. Keeping a sketchbook is a really good idea, and I want to do sketches from life more often. It's good practice, and there is always something that you can draw from life, even if its your dog. She is good at one minute poses, so its good experience for quick sketches. This is something that I can do every day for a year. A few minutes focused on something you want to capture is almost as good as painting, and value sketches are critical to creating an interesting composition.
this is an 18 x 24 oil painting I did in 1995, and titled it "Big Sky". It's from a reference photo of a trip my dad and I took to the Dakotas several years before. It is one of my personal artist's collection. I have always loved sky paintings that have wonderful depth and it was about this time I realized that skies have as much depth as the landscape. They really have much more, of course, but we usually don't see it. Usually, they are an afterthought in landscape paintings. (Paint all the stuff and then you have to put in a sky.) Some landscape paintings don't even have skies. It resonated with me once more reading Georgia O'Keefe's words at the museum in Santa Fe, that she painted the bones against the sky, because there is more of it than anything else here. My drive on the way back from New Mexico was long, and through an impending storm. The growing storm clouds were irresistable, and the landscape was so small in comparison. I still want to finish my cow paintings, but the sky is calling me.
