Antholzer Wald

Antholzer Wald  Watercolor  12x16

Most of the Antholz valley (Antholzertal) is filled with open farmland and beautiful solidly-built alpine-style barns and houses with ornate woodwork.  But all along the edges of the valley, where the land is too steep to graze on, are tall straight fir trees.  These steep hillsides show signs of logging--lots of scattered small streaks of cleared timber that must have been hard work to log.  I definitely wonder a bit at how they avoid erosion on those super-steep faces--though the clearcuts are small and spread out and almost look like natural slides or something, they still must get some erosion problems.  At the base of the valley are large lumber-yards with stacks upon stacks of extremely well-organized lumber.  So apparently all those little hillside mini-clearcuts must yield a lot of timber.  Looking at those stacks of lumber, I remembered that Holz means wood (or lumber) in German.  So Antholz was actually named after its timber.  If they'd wanted to refer to the "woods" they would have said "wald" instead of "holz."  The Italian name for the valley--Anterselva--also shows this meaning as well.  Imagine that if it were allowed to return to its natural state, the entire valley would be a beautiful but significantly less sunny sylvan landscape.  I painted this from a photo I took as I skied the pass at the end of the valley, called Staller Pass.  

Photographs and Quick Paintings

I take a lot of photos with my little cheap point-and-shoot.  Some come out really bad, and some come out pretty good--good enough to use as references for painting!  But usually I don't think of the photos themselves as art; they're just a means to capture pretty moments to remember them or to paint them later.  But I like these two photos better as photos than as things to paint, I think.  I tried painting one of them, and the results of that are further below.  

Antholz is so beautiful when its sunny and you can see the mountains...but I tried taking pictures of this shed when it was sunny, and I didn't like them nearly as much.  (Antholz, Italy)

Maybe I should have converted these to black and white...they almost already are, anyway. 

Looking at this now, I could really go back and work on it some more, and it would probably get a lot better. Maybe I'll still do that.  But at the time, I just wanted to do a quick painting and use my masking fluid some more.  

I used the masking fluid for this one too.  I really only did it because when I went to use my paper-block, the top sheet had a blue smear left on it, so I had to paint this one before I could paint the one above.  They're meant to be aspens, but they came out looking a lot more like birch trees.  

Pigs and Lessons

Oop, I thought I'd published this last week, but then I signed on to make a new post, and this was still just a draft!  So now its even later than before.  I'd blame it on the really terrible internet here in Italy, but its probably just my fault.  Here it is: 

I'm sorry to everyone that I went for so long without posting anything.  I'm also just sorry that I didn't  paint more in the last few months...painting always makes me happy.  But its also not that I wasn't painting at all; it was that I'd stalled on a painting.  And I should have known better.  I'd decided that since I'd had so much fun making my previous pig painting,  I would do another one.  I'd been struggling to come up with a new idea for a painting, and this was the best I could think of, but I just wasn't that excited about it at the time.  And I started it on big paper, in a very detailed style.  So I ened up working on it very slowly,  in a somewhat-less-than-enthusiastic manner for a long time.  Like all of my paintings, it went through some stages where I almost decided that it was really awful an wasn't worth continuing to work on.  But I wouldn't let my self start another one until it was done.  Finally by the end of it, as I was getting happier with how it looked, I got into it and was having more fun.  And I'm quite happy with it now.  So I learned a few lessons:  

1.  It really is worth pushing through the ugly-phase to try to make paintings better.

2.  Make sure I'm really excited about an idea before I start painting.

3. There isn't really any reason to make myself finish one painting before starting another, especially if 

it means that I'll paint more.

4.  I should do more smaller, quicker paintings, to help get myself re-energized for painting. 

So now I hope to be doing more painting and more posting!  Right now I'm in Antholz, Italy for biathlon World Cup races.  So expect some Italian Alps paintings soon!

Beautiful Barn

When I was in Utah, we drove (or rollerskied, sometimes) past this barn every day on the way to practice.  Normally I like old falling-down barns the best, but this one was new and really beautiful.  I later found out that it was a re-build of an old barn (the Tate barn) that had fallen down, and that now it wasn't really in use...it was rebuilt because it was so iconic and now it seems to be used to store golf carts.   This make me sad.  But its still pretty to look at.  And in general, I support the building of new barns and hope to build one myself some day.  That way in the future we will continue to have old, falling down beautiful barns!

Aspens to Infinity

I'm in Utah right now for a biathlon training camp, so it only seemed fitting to make at least one Utah painting while I was out here.  But I decided that before I was going to paint an aspen grove, I needed some masking fluid.  I'd been meaning to experiment with masking fluid for a while, so this was the perfect time to do it!  Masking fluid is basically like rubber cement that you can paint on the the paper, and it dries into a thin rubbery film.  You can then paint over it and it protects the paper wherever you put it.  When you pull it off, you have nice clean white paper underneath!  It was really fun to use, and fun to peel off too--like peeling of a really bad blistered sunburn.  The leaves had actually already fallen off most of the aspens when we got here, but I had to add them back in because I just love their bright yellow color.  

Windmills

I've been watching all summer as more and more windmills slowly appear on the horizon.  Everything else aside, I think that they're beautiful--like big functional kinetic sculptures.  Our landscape in Vermont has been shaped so much by humans already--the fields, barns, stone walls, rows of corn.  Many parts of this human-created landscape are what make Vermont beautiful.  And they also serve(d) a function.  Plus, the world needs more windmills and fewer oil-wells.  

I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this painting, but thats OK.  I'm trying to experiment more with being less constrained by copying photographs, and instead just trying to create the right light or texture or pattern.  Its hard!

Late Summer Cows

I'm a little behind the seasons with my paintings.   This one looks spring-y, but its actually from a picture I took in late summer.  But clearly I need to do some fall paintings.  The only problem is that I've done a horrible job of taking good fall pictures.  If you have any pretty fall pictures, send them my way!
I also tried not to get too stuck in being super-realistic with this one.  Some of my favorite paintings are the most stylized ones, but sometimes I get in a rut with copying photographs too closely.  It helped that the photo I used for most of this painting was really bad and washed out and didn't show the sky at all, so I was forced to be a bit more creative.