LJ and NJ

A couple of months ago i posted photo of a painting based on a rainbow i saw in New Zealand. while i was pretty satisfied with most of the painting, i was not happy with how the rainbow turned out. I let the painting sit for a while and then this week got back to it. My thought was that i would proceed by obliterating the rainbow and then repainting it, hopefully more successfully than i’d done the first time around. What happened, though, was that after putting on a thin layer of grayish paint which “pushed” the rainbow back i liked the effect. So i left it in place; then re-worked some of the cliffs, clouds and sky, and am now calling it “done” once again. in the images below, the top one is the revised painting; the bottom is the one i posted in May.

I haven’t had a chance to paint for past couple of weeks. So tonight when i got back to it i decided to put finishing touches on a little painting of a meadowlark who apparently thought winter was over and the coast was clear to fly back to Colorado. Wrong. This photo was taken just a few weeks ago: folllwing several days of very warm weather and spring sunshine, we had a surprise snowstorm. This little guy was sitting on a fence post trying to make the most of it. 8” x 8”, oil on panel.

Twice a year the gallery where i take my oil painting lessons has what they call their “6 x 6 Show”. Anyone in the community who wishes to participate can purchase a wooden square cradle board with dimensions 6” x 6’. Then you can do any kind of decoration you wish with the board —- painting, drawing, fabric, textiles, etc. I have entered this show several times over the past several years. All entries are for sale and are shown at the gallery for a month.

This year for my project i wanted to do something i’d call “false spring” because this happens so often here in Colorado. the trees think it’s Spring, which it is by the calendar; but that does not mean winter is really over. So we get trees with beautiful blooms which then are compromised by a spring snowstorm.

I painted my project in oils, on canvas paper and then glued the little painting to the face of the cradle board. You are certainly permitted to paint directly on to the board but when i’ve tried that in the past i find it awkward to do because you have to work around the “cradle”. I used two photos for reference and combined them to create my “false spring”. Both photos are shown, separately, below, and the painting is the third photo down. I wanted to emphasize the winters aspect of the scene, which is why i set the bird house back and made a lot of the painting kind of blurry, to show what it’s like when it is snowing heavily.

A few weeks ago i posted the third of my paintings based on a visit last fall to the South Island of New Zealand. the work didn’t feel quite right to me at the time i posted, but i decided to go ahead and post and then return to the painting when i had a better idea about where i needed to make improvements. Eventually i came up with some ideas and worked to get them down on canvas. Part of the problem with the original post — at least to me —was the way the foreground was placed, with so much prominence when it was not meant to be a focus of the painting. Another issue was the trees. I liked the way they came out but wasn’t crazy about their placement in perspective. Third, the field was pretty bare. While i wanted some attention to go to the light on the right-side mountain, i think i needed to spruce up that field with at least something in it.

It’s important to me that the viewer think about the painting as a stand-alone piece. I’m wanting with my work to move from exact copying of a scene/subject to an interpretation of what the scene feels like to me. In this case, although i do love painting cloudy days (it was pretty cloudy the day the photo was taken). i wanted to lighten this one up just a bit — but without destroying the feeling of open space and vastness.

In the two photos below, the top one is the one i posted in February. The bottom one is the newer one. I have purposely left out the reference photo this time (although you can find it easily enough) in order to decrease one-to-one comparisons of painting (s) with original setting .

11’ x 14” oil on panel (both)

Here is another painting based on our trip to New Zealand last October. This one is actually situated in the field next to the sheepherder’s cabin that was the focus of the last painting i posted a few weeks ago. What appealed to me was the starkness of the landscape and the contrasts in texture —- mountains, snow, plants, soft grasses. Below is photo of the painting; underneath that is reference photo. Norma took the original photo, and she was drawn to the light. As i indicated above, my interest was less on the light and more on the landscape itself. One additional note: i really wanted to include the fence, but couldn’t get it to work. Maybe next time!

Oil on panel (Raymer), 11” x 14”.

Reference photo. October, 2024. South Island, New Zealand .

This is another painting based on photos from trip to New Zealand this past fall (which would be New Zealand’s spring). I was very taken with these small old buildings, out in the middle of the stark but spectacular landscape. Artistically the main challenge for me was to make the buildings seem old (which they are) but not falling apart (which they are not. Lighting was also an issue. It was a cloudy day, with the sun in and out. And while in the reference photo you can see some sun on the distant mountains, there really weren’t shadows i could work with to increase sense of depth. Also, as you can see in the reference photo, there is a brown building between two other buildings. I left this one out because if you look carefully you can see that what looks like the roof of that brown building is really part of the mountains behind. I could have adjusted that part of the picture but decided the danger of confusion for the viewer was still pretty high — so left it out.

Oil on panel, 11” x 14”

Lately i’ve been working on trying to get more proficient in painting various kinds of edges — hard edges, soft edges and lost edges. Soft edges have always been a challenge for me. In part this is because if you are painting wet on wet with oil paints the probability of muddying up whatever part of the canvas you are working on is very high, unless you work very carefully and are either very clear about what to do or very lucky. So i decided to do an exercise focusing on soft edges, and painting clouds seemed like a good model. The reference photo is of a fiord in Norway. I still have a little work to do to improve the shape of a couple of the mountains, but otherwise i think this one is pretty much done.

adding photo taken in more natural light