Eider Ducks were everywhere and especially sitting on their nests situated in the grass. The females of course were hard to see because they nested in colors similar to their feather hues. This makes for a wonderful landscape-something which  is so part of the land. What is the most important element in a landscape? If you make it one bird you then have a portrait! Make it the clear connections which we feel between land, sky, water and birds. This becomes meaningful not just accurate.

Neutrals? This is a great example of painting with neutrals-sepias and greys. It is a safe version of warm and cool colors and safe because there are no distracting colors-we see form.
Form is a lot of what makes a great painting. Isolate form by using neutrals. Come to Pt.  Reyes, July 26 & 27th for classes in painting. Also Wildwyo.org has a painting weekend June 29th & 30th near Sheridan. Come practice neutrals!

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!