Oil Painting
16 x 20 inches

I have been working on some interior scenes recently...I find them interesting because the light is so different from outdoors and the objects and shapes in interior scenes are also different.  In an outdoor landscape I may be working with a depth of 50 miles...here it is only a few feet.  It keeps me on my toes to approach different subjects and lighting conditions like this.

Oil Painting
24 x 48 inches
An evening scene in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, looking northeast toward the Sangre de Cristo range, from a spot south of the town of Alamosa.  This was one of those very brief lighting conditions, with the fading sunlight only reaching the top of the peaks, which reach about 14,000 feet while the valley floor is more like 7,000 feet above sea level.  I have been working on some larger format paintings recently and really enjoyed this 2 x 4 foot work.

Oil Painting
14 x 18 inches

I painted this from a photo I took on a trip across West Virginia late in the day.  One of the pitfalls in painting from a photo is that you can become too mechanical in copying the photo...so in this case I only used the photo at the start of the painting process, for the placement of shapes including the shapes of light on the houses.  After I had the design laid out I covered the photo and completed the painting, choosing colors based on what seemed best for the painting.

Oil Painting
30 x 40 inches
An early morning scene on a recent Sunday in Telluride, Colorado

Oil Painting
18 x 14 inches

A scene in the Sawtooth Range in Idaho.  Ellen and I took a trip here after a weekend art festival in Ketchum, Idaho.  The Sawtooth Range is a little out of the way, but it is a beautiful place and worth a detour, in our case about an hour from Ketchum (which is itself a long trip for us).  The colors in the painting are influenced by the fact that the air was quite smoky from the many wildfires burning in the West.  I like the colors in the painting, and for a painter it is useful to have distant mountains recede...but I cannot think of anything else I like about these fires.

Oil Painting
14 x 11 inches
This is a group of folk dancers at one of the many festivals in southern France.  I didn't really understand the dance but it involves the handling of these wooden sticks and the wearing of wooden shoes called "sabot".  Thinking of how difficult it is to WALK in wooden shoes, I much admired their skill in dancing in them.  And,  the red scarves and black hats added a stylish touch.

Oil Painting
11 x 14 inches
My wife Ellen and I were travelling by bike through Burgundy when we came across this scene.  On foot, or on bicycle or by car, it was a good day to be in the Burgundy countryside.