Recent watercolors

I usually start my watercolors with no drawing, preferring instead to evolve the painting by throwing down value washes. The giraffe was done this way. The portrait was done from a book I have on Russian artists. Painting can be like sculpture -- working with the paint and brushwork to shape the object you are working with.

Wyoming Sundown -- in progress

This painting is up on the easel -- Wyoming Sundown, an oil on canvas. Should I say it's been up, down, up and down numerous times on the easel. It's only a partial shot of a larger painting and I shot the photo in terrible light. Anyhow I've been working on this intermittently confronting one problem after another. While working on it I've had to repaint several major areas, glaze over part of the mountain to get it to go back in space. I was really taken with this scene, but the painting has given me so many problems that I just can't tell whether or not I like it. The light rakes across the scene at a low angle only touching certain things. I really like what I did with the sky, mountain, foreground rocks along the road and the low grasses. It's the hay bales and ground that bother me. Maybe too much work on the closest hay bale -- it's overworked. This is why it's been set aside numerous times. This is from my excursion out west to Cody, Wyoming a couple years ago, an unforgettable trip made even more unfogettable by the difficulties of this painting.

Plein air in Wildwood

This is an 8" X 10" oil done a couple weeks ago. The day was bright and sunny and maybe my background got a little too light. The interesting part of the story is that I painted near this spot over 30 years ago when I was still in art school. The assignment was to do a landscape outdoors. I had only done a few of them and didn't know that 18" X 24" was rather large for outdoor painting, at least for a beginner. (That's nothing if your name is Joachin Sorolla or Aldro T. Hibbard.) The painting turned out good, very brushy and I wound up selling it almost immediately at the gallery that represented me at that time, after I finished art school. This was in Bartlesville, Oklahoma at Talisman Gallery that used to sell Richard Schmid. In the mean time, Jody Kirberger, the owner of Talisman has now retired, but not before selling one of my pastels before shutting the doors. Now I am on the Xanadu Gallery list of Studio artists and an artist member of The Next Picture Show Gallery.

Ambush portrait and other recent watercolors

These were done in the last two weeks. First is the ambush portrait of Michelle (dark hair), the others were done from photographs. They are all in the 7" X 10" range.