This painting comes from a hike this past winter in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The vividness of the moss in winter is so striking. Much of the park was settled, logged and in threat of being clear cut before it was made a national park. I love the idea that the trees have taken back their land.
These two paintings come from the same hike in Shenandoah National Park. It was a misty, foggy morning so we did not get a view from the top, but there were some wonderfully moody and atmospheric settings. I really liked the gnarly old trees and waist-deep ferns on this hike.
I set up on a windy, rainy afternoon in a shelter house at Celestine Community Club to paint this little plein air piece. Because of the wind, I was thankful for my Take It Easel; it stayed put, and after using a bungee cord wrapped around the edges of my board, my canvas didn’t budge despite the whipping wind.
I made a bit of a mistake with this composition. I really like that little sliver of grass and sky on the extreme right side. I think it adds little bit of air and space over there. However, once I slipped this board into a frame, the rabbet covered up that part of the painting, and I realized I had not accounted for that when planning the composition! Lesson learned- take into account that the edges of the painting disappear inside a frame, and this makes quite a difference on really small compositions.
Here’s a painting from my trip to the Swiss Alps last summer. We stayed in Gimmelwald in the Bernese Oberland Region. My husband and I joked that every place we stood was a 45 degree angle. This painting became about the sharp angles of the mountains. I tried to balance the negative slope of the foreground grass with the positive slope of the distant mountains. I was also trying to keep each slope a slightly different angle for variety.
It’s wonderful when the weather turns and it’s warm enough to enjoy being outside again. I painted this small painting in a creek near my house early this spring when the redbuds were blooming and the leaves of the undergrowth were just starting to pop. There’s an interesting contrast in the woods at that time between the achromatic trees, ground and rocks and the very highly saturated new growth of the buds and blooms. The greens of the woods for those couple of weeks becomes an almost fluorescent green.
After a couple of hours painting plein air, the painting still needed some work. I spent a couple of more sessions on it in the studio bringing it a bit more up to snuff.
The corn field in front of our house has a lone cedar tree on its edge, and when the winter sun sets in the valley, one strip of sunlight illuminates it and the golden field right before dusk. I started this painting at a workshop I taught at the French Lick Artisan Gallery this past winter. I really happy with the final result of muted blues and yellows. It is a good to branch out from the very green paintings of summer. When teaching the workshop, we started with the traditional monochromatic underpainting-this one in burnt sienna. Then, I blocked in the large areas of color (bottom image) and continued to add detail on top. When composing the painting, I was intrigued and played around with the overlapping diagonal curves.
Snow Creek, 2014, oil, 36 x 48 in
During an evening walk, my husband and I wandered up this small creek with exposed bedrock. The setting sun warmed the snow with an orange glow, and the remaining beech leaves shone as if fragments of stained glass hung in the air.
Another plein air painting on a hillside near my studio that my husband and I always joke is our own hobbit hill…
Working to improve my efficiency with colors and values, I have been working on these smaller plein air paintings. I want to be able to quickly and effectively give a sense of the space of a scene.
Here is another little plein air painting I completed this summer at Spring Mill State Park in Indiana. It was a hot, humid, 90-degree day, hence the intensity of the light on the field behind this stand of trees.