Our property is adjacent to Santa Teresa County Park, so we sort of have a really big backyard.
Here's my painting of a tree in the park (oil on panel). When I started painting it, there were cows on the hill. A few minutes later, they were gone. I'll just say I left them out so I can title it something clever like "Where Did All the Cows Go?"
The recent rain has caused an explosion of wildflowers in California. Yesterday, we decided to take a day trip to Carrizo Plain National Monument, just east of San Luis Obispo. The swaths of gold were truly spectacular. I sketched the blooms near the salt encrusted Soda Lake. M. took a photo of me as I was working.
I sketched this on Bee Paper's Super Deluxe Mixed Media sketchbook, which has been recommended by several sketchers as a good, reasonably priced workhorse surface. While I've been happy drawing on Bee's Pen Sketcher's paper, the Mixed Media one just isn't my jam for ink & watercolor work. Its weight and tooth feel more suited to dry media.
My paintings of the hills behind our house are done and framed and up on the wall!
Golden Open acrylic on canvas. Really pleased with the gold floater frames from PictureFrames.com. Here's how they look in the room.
We spent our first New Year's in California cooking, eating, and going to wineries with friends. On that Sunday, M and I capped off the holiday with a hike in Henry Coe State Park, where I just had to stop and paint this twisting, gnarled tree. Not a bad way to start 2016!
As we gear up for yet another wintry mix event here in Connecticut, it's nice to remember that the snow will, eventually, melt. Here are two paintings I did several years ago, inspired by a workshop I took with artist William McCarthy at the Rowayton Arts Center.
Was glad to be in Vermont, truly -- after it was ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene, I really wanted to support the state, spend money in its restaurants, eat maple candy and gawk at the glorious foliage. How fortuitous that I'd signed up for Susan Abbott's fall Vermont landscape workshop, I thought.
Well, we did the first three. The foliage (what there was of it) hid behind mists and drizzles and on-and-off downpours. Not the most auspicious weather for plein air landscapes. Despite my moodiness, and the bugs, and the mud, there was sketching. And painting. (Some outdoors, even.)
We stayed at Pie in the Sky B&B in Marshfield for the first two nights. They have sheep. (And a guard llama, which didn't stay in one spot long enough to make it into my sketchbook.)
Later in the week we stayed at Emergo Farms B&B, in Danville -- it's a dairy farm that supplies Cabot.
While it rained, we did exercises in the studio:
And when the clouds parted, we rushed outside hoping to avoid the ambush of sudden showers.
The rain helped paint this one:
It's hard to be spontaneous when faced with a sheet of Arches paper. I like this color sketch better than the actual painting I did right after.
We sketched and painted on lands private and public. People have a lot of land up there.
So? Go! Go wander Montpelier and buy art supplies at The Drawing Board, eat at Tip Top Cafe in White River Junction and Elements in St. Johnsbury. Bike the Kingdom Trails rain or shine. And at the end of the day, savor a maple creamy at Bragg Farm. Yum.
It's been some time in the making, but I finally redid the sky, added the houses, and signed it. It's quite different from the photo it's based on -- I took the photo in bleak winter many years ago, and clearly the painting is of a much sunnier time.
The Road, Donegal; oil on panel, 13.5" x 13.5" framed.
Posts
