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.

Oil Painting
30 x 40 inches
I had an urge to do some larger landscapes, so this is one of them.  It is a scene in the south of France, one of the many tree-lined country roads.  Such roads are among my favorite subjects to paint, and among my favorite places to explore on road trips (I suppose those two are connected!)

Oil Painting
10 x 8 inches
Painted on-site along the Platte River in Colorado.  A pleasure to paint with the sound of the river so close by!

Oil Painting
10 x 8 inches
A white iris painted at a garden in Denver.  

The plein-air season has begun!  I had a great winter painting in the studio but now it's refreshing to paint outdoors again.  It's a little extra bother, with all of the packing/unpacking and transport to the painting location...but it is such good practice and so enjoyable that it's worth it.  I did a couple of iris studies on location, and this was my favorite.

Oil Painting
20 x 16 inches

A scene in Lyon, France.  In this view I was interested in the narrow slot at the bottom of this outdoor staircase between two old buildings.  Lyon is built between and along 2 rivers and on one side goes up a steep bluff.  This scene is at the bottom of one of the routes down the bluff.

Oil Painting
12 x 16 inches
A scene at the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado

Oil Painting 20 x 16 inches. Drawing 6.25 x 5 inches. A street scene in Paris.

For the past couple of months I have re-introduced the habit of doing preliminary sketches before starting a painting. I had stopped doing them over a year ago because I was eager to get going with each painting and also because I didn't want to "over-think" a painting but rather keep it spontaneous.

I started back up again because in looking through the paintings in my studio I found too many that had to be scrapped because of fundamental design flaws which could have been prevented by studying the scene via a pencil sketch. Some of these paintings contained some beautiful paint...but if the design is bad then the painting has to go. (fortunately I found many more that did NOT have to be scrapped)

In my recent work I am finding that the sketches are helping me to avoid some of the worst problems and to focus on what each painting is about. The trick is to do this without getting too careful and "tight"...but then it wouldn't be painting without a little challenge!

So, I thought it might be interesting to show you both the painting and the sketch.

Oil Painting

20 x 16 inches

An early-morning Paris scene with Sacre Coeur in the background.

Oil Painting
30 x 40 inches
Breakfast at a cafe in Montmartre in Paris.

As this is my first post of 2012, I will wish everyone a happy new year! The above painting is one of my first of the year. As I reflect on what I'd like 2012 to be like, one of my goals is to take a little more time to contemplate the design of each painting before putting brush to canvas...i.e. the use of light, color, lines, the placement of shapes of various sizes, the overall story or idea to be conveyed in the painting, and so forth.

Another goal is to get myself over to the gym a little more often, but we'll consider that beyond the scope of this blog...