Morning Impression

"Morning Impression"  5" x 7"    Oil on board
SOLD

I rarely do really small paintings, but this week I decided it might be fun to make some small studies.  The problem with painting really small is capturing enough to make the painting work while not over-crowding it.

I remember nearly thirty years ago, I was commissioned to do a 3 x 6 foot mural.  I submitted to the client three miniature watercolor studies, each one-twelfth of that size, each a different point of view.  My plan was to take the mural from the study they chose, but to my shock when I began to lay out the composition, I discovered it would not work:  it fell apart when enlarged  to twelve times its size.

I learned an important lesson with that project:  make sure the composition will work regardless of the size.

This little painting is from an early morning visit to York Falls during early summer.  The light was flooding through the trees filtered by a light mist in the distance.  It was a brief impression, and then it was gone.

She Keeps On Going

"She Keeps On Going"    12" x 16"   Oil on Canvas
SOLD

After I get a painting set up and during the time I'm getting the canvas covered with paint, I usually have music going in the background, but while this one was being developed, I happened to have the TV on, listening to Charley Rose interviewing folks who have been covering the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I have worried a lot lately about how attitudes towards this movement get formed according to which network a person is watching, about how our country is influenced by bias more than by fact.  But then my attention turned away from all this and back to the river and, taking a deep breath, it occurred to me that the river keeps on going regardless.  I continue to go back to the river because it retains its own truth, uninfluenced by all the noise of politics.

I'm making this painting available for auction.  You can bid on it by going HERE.

Tallulah Rush"

"Tallulah Rush"     12" x 16 "   Oil on Canvas
Available on Daily PaintWorks

One reason I keep going back to the Tallulah is I am never able to take all in.   In some areas it is so quiet you can barely hear the flow and many trickles of the water.  In other places, the water rushes so fast that the sound of its roar is almost deafening.  And the light changes from one minute to the other, causing a deep shadow to almost instantly become a pool of light .  It's like a perpetual slide show so encompassing that it's easy to go into an hypnotic state, awestruck as images pass in front of your eyes.

For fun, I set this painting up with converging lines, a principle I discuss in this week's Compose tutorial where the vanishing point appears outside the painting.  By using this, I was able to give order to an otherwise chaotic scene.

Both Strong and Delicate

"Tallulah Bouders, Today"    12" x 16"   Oil on Canvas
$210  BUY
Click on image for larger view

It is those huge boulders on the Tallulah that caught my attention this week.

I have never visited the Tallulah River without being keenly reminded of how deeply we humans are connected to the earth.  I wonder why in the world  anybody would object to protecting our planet.  Here are huge boulders untouched by human's tendency to harvest for their own profit and flowing through them are waters replete with life.  It is one of the few areas in our mountains that is surviving the deluge of human activity.

As as a sidebar:  With this week's post, I'm introducing my new association with Daily PaintWorks, an on-line sales gallery and auction website owned and managed by David Marine, husband of artist Carol Marine.  I'm excited about this new opportunity to make my work available for sale on a website with such a high degree of integrity.

Very soon, I will be presenting a pre-Christmas auction of small works.