Grand Canyon here I come!

Next week I take off for fun to the Grand Canyon and play and paint for a week. Here is an oil painted en plein air on the Colorado River: 2009 raft trip. I'll paint at the rim this trip. The two separate views could not be more different to capture in paint. But the energy and brushstrokes pull me through!

I visited this Sugar House and wanted a painting of the activity. Sugaring is great. Its a little boring watching sap boil, but the lore and people are make up for it. Sipping sap from the tree, sloshing buckets and seeing how much wood it takes to keep the fire hot was interesting. How will I paint the Sugar maples-sugarbush-with the sugar house in my next oil? In this painting I dialed up the rich darks as a backdrop and respected the low light ever present in Vermont.

Here is a gem of a painting from my last trip to California, where I painted en plein air south of Davenport at my favorite beach. How to capture the intimacy of the rocks and the stretch of the Pacific Ocean all at the same time. Early California Painters inspire me to use rich colors and warms and cools impressionistically to reach their heights of painting brilliance. I'll be back in California for Pt Reyes Seashore Classes in July! Come painting.

I painted these two loons because loons have been on my radar. Haven't yet seen them this Spring. I do data entry for a Loon Survey and when I read the data this image pop into my head-here is the oil. The pair is obscure, elusive, together and drifting. They are grounded in the icy water, which I see as the ice recedes on Vermont ponds.

Cow Canyon Trading Post, in Bluff Utah, handles my oil paintings and of course, I have to put it in paint. I work with mountain ranges and so this image with lots of objects instead of space challenges me to keep them in scale to each other. In the mountain ranges its more important to show what mountain is in front so they are not linear, but have form. Composition is what tells your story and therefore frustrates painters when it doesn't represent what they saw. Re-scale your objects or mountains. Get it right!

Here is the Howe Covered Bridge in oil paint on a late winter day. I was inspired by a great oil painter, Aldo Hibbard from the 1920's. He was a Vermont painter and excellent at capturing the very low light which occurs all year in Vermont! He allowed objects to have similar values, but different colors and this way his "edges" are sublime and so subtle.
Look at the blue house and the tree at its left side, or
the tree and the bridge.

Here is a painting that is all about the paint. And color? Its about the complimentary colors. Twenty-five percent warm colors and seventy-five percent cool colors! Complimentary colors are any conbination of "blues and ochres." If the colors feel good they are complimentary. They may not be exactly across from each on the color wheel, but one hue and its complimentary neutral!