Not too much so far  to say about my efforts this week.  I’ve been experimenting with colors and values to try for acheieving certain effects.    Still very much a work in progress!

When i could grab a few minutes during the last 10 days or so, i went to my studio and experimented with several different approaches to this new painting.  Last week in class, teacher suggested i think about the painting as: the mountains would be in focus, whereas the lower part of the painting would be analagous to me being in a car whirring past fast, so the features of the landscape would be blurred.  I took this to mean i should paint, say, the rocks, as rocks, and then blur them with various techniques .  I thought this would be really easy, as it seemed it would be like stuff I’ve done in the past with reflections in water.  Not so fast.  No matter what i tried, it fell woefully short.  If i can, I’ll atttach to this post a couple of my experiments.  So today i went into class and turned out i had misunderstood teacher (who told me, in any case, to stop worrying about what he wanted, and go for what i’d Like to see on the canvas.  In any event, what he had intended for me to do was to just paint something blurry in the first place with vague shapes that had some vague relationship to reality.  Once i got that message it got easier.  The attempt  i am posting here will show kind of what i am after with the brown grasses/rocks.  The rocks that sit separately are just painted in to put them in place.  They are just a first try.  then went back to working on sky .  (Note: photos below are in chronological order, with the bottom right one being today’s effort.  Hope reader can tell the differences!)  also, sky may very well look better from last week.  That’s because i am in midst of repainting it and it’s full of half-done brush strokes.  Stay tuned.