Oil Painting
9 x 12 inches

The plein-air season is well underway for me, and this is one I did recently not far from my home in Colorado.  Aspen trunks are a subject I've returned to many times in the field.  They are a great opportunity to study light and shadow, and each tree has its own variations on the standard Aspen themes.  Plein air is certainly not the only type of painting I do, but it is an important part of the mix and helps me develop good painting habits.

Has it really been over 6 months since my last post??  Last weekend an artist friend reminded me that it's been awhile, and so it has!  Since my last post I have spent many of the long winter evenings making a new website, which can be found at http://RNaylorStudio.com    The long winter evenings are of course now long gone, but the new website did take up a lot of my computer time for awhile.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

The painting above is one of a series of night scenes I painted, this one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, along the old Route 66.  It is an oil painting, 18 x 14 inches.  As is well known, I am very fond of strongly lit daytime scenes, so this was part of an effort to explore different types of light.  It was both a challenge and a pleasure to paint this.

PS  Yes, I will plan to increase the frequency of these posts!

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.