A Painting Progression

Goats and Greens

Veggie fields at Pete's Greens.  Oil on hardboard.

For the past week here in Lake Placid, I've been concurrently working on two paintings: an oil painting, and a watercolor.  This works well because oil paint dries slowly and often I need to give the painting a day or two to dry before I can continue working on it without the lights and darks getting all muddled together.  I suppose I could have done two oil paintings at once, but its fun to switch back and forth--both mediums have their pros and cons.
Both of these paintings presented challenges to me--I had to re-do the rows of seedlings quite a few times before I was satisfied.  But the baby goats were especially hard.  Its hard enough to capture the essence of one creature--let alone a whole bunch at once.  I'm still not happy with them!  I think I should start doing more animal paintings--they're a good challenge.

Baby Goats.  There's no way they would have been in a row
like this without a fence.  Maybe I should have painted the
fence too?  

Kowhai and Frederick

This painting isn't for sale, but I wanted to post something so that my multitudes of blog readers (hehe) would know that I am still in fact painting.  I visited Nils at his family's farm in Maine, and had lots of fun helping out (playing) with the goats.  I helped pull this particular baby goat into the world.  We named him Frederick.  Sadly his mother, Kowhai, died from complications with a second baby.  So I made this painting in memory of her.  She was a very nice goat.
I painted it during my first biathlon-training stint in Lake Placid. Painting things like this is a great way for me to stay sane while living at the olympic training center there.  I'm going to be spending quite a bit more time there this summer, so that should ensure more paintings!  And I took lots of baby goat pictures, so there will probably be some more baby goat paintings too!

Spring greens!

Despite being not in Vermont, as soon as the ski season was over I was getting a hankering to paint some springtime-in-VT colors. So I dug up some of the photos I took last spring when the grass and trees were so bright green that whenever I tried to paint them they just looked fake. I decided that I wanted to do a little bit of experimenting with brighter colors and less careful copying of reality. And it was fun! The inspiration for these two paintings came from my favorite VT artists--Woody Jackson (top one) and Sabra Field (bottom). Now I'm excited to get home and do some paintings of this spring!

Both are watercolor, 9 x 12.

Sugaring-Season Barn

One of my favorite places in the world: "Dumdum's" Farm in West Fairlee, VT. Growing up, we'd go to the farm every sugaring season, Easter, and thanksgiving, as well as random other times to help my grandpa get in the sugar wood or do work around the farm. This year sugaring season came early and was very short. I only got in one solid day of sugaring between ski races and travel. But it was a beautiful bluebird sugaring-season day, and we did a little bit of everything--tapped trees, checked the lines, hiked to the top of the hill, boiled all day, made several batches of syrup, and did a lot of sitting out in the sun.

Watercolor, 9x12.

Well, I went for too long without painting or posting anything here. That long without any art is bad for my sanity!

I decided that I wanted to paint something fun and quick, and I'd had so much fun painting that bright sunset that I decided to just do another variation of it! Sunsets are great because they change quickly so you can take lots of pictures that look pretty different. Plus they're basically just an abstraction anyway, so its a great opportunity to just get the page really wet and slap on lots of brightly colored paint and let it all run together and see what happens. I normally paint on dry paper and don't take much advantage of the bleeding effects of watercolor, so this was a good little break from being meticulous all the time.

Snowy Shadows

I'm still in Canmore, but this painting is from a photo I took in Craftsbury. Looking through the crab apple tree on Murphy's field. Its pretty similar to some other wintery-shadowy paintings I did last year. So I guess in that sense its a bit boring, but I had fun painting it! I love when nature creates such bold contrasts, deep colors, and almost abstract shapes and patterns. And as always I'm also enamored of trees of all types.

Looking back at the painting now, I'm not sure I gave the sun enough warmth--I might have to go back and fix that!