White Mums 2

These last 3 paintings have mostly been a case of trying to salvage something from a disaster. Back in the day when I painted watercolor on paper, I actually planned what I was going to paint and had pencil outlines of what it was I was painting. Just winging it doesn't work, but I'm sort of into just winging it these days, so I guess I'll call this experiment quits now and go back to painting on boards.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

White Mums

Ideally I should be doing something on paper that I couldn't be doing on board, which is not the case in this effort. Mostly it was an exercise in what not to do. But that's all good: if I remember what not to do, which is iffy.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor paper

Red and Yellow Flowers

It's been summer in March around here for the last two weeks. (Very weird.) I've not cared to miss a minute of it inside painting, especially since I had nothing in mind to paint... Today is cool and cloudy, so I despite the fact that I still had nothing in mind to paint, I decided I might as well get back into painting. I decided that if I really wanted to do something different, I'd have to do it in a different way altogether. This is just a series of experiments using acrylic on watercolor paper with nothing in mind to start with, and then a series of 'what can I do to savage this...' experiments. I think the black outline made this piece at least worthy of posting.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor paper

A Barsoom Landscape

An Impressionist on Barsoom. It's been the best part of half a century since I first read A Princess of Mars, but with the movie version just out, I thought I'd paint a scene from the book. This is a caravan of the green men of Barsoom crossing one of the moss covered long vanished sea bottoms with an old shore line in the distance. The details are best left to the vagueness of imagination, but I sought to try to capture a little hint of something spacious and alien in this painting. This, I hope is not Utah.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Yixing Tea Set

Back to still life and painting light with darkness.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Road to the Loch

This is the last of perhaps half a dozen paintings I did on this board. They just never lasted long enough to be photographed. Again, this is based very loosely on some google street view shots from the Scottish Highlands.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Yellow Flowers, Unarranged

A Sunday morning painting. Pretty much improvised around the idea of painting light by painting darkness.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

A Road to the Highlands 2

I wanted to paint this tree lined road, but if I also wanted to get the sweeping sense of the locale, I would have had to include a whole lot of foliage on the top of the painting, unless I used this 12x24" format. I also wanted to make it a warm hazy day: I'm still trying to find the right color in the sky to suggest both light and warmth. Like the previous posting, this is loosely based on a google street view.

12x24" 30x60cm acrylic on hardboard

A Road to the Highlands (Revised)

Scraped the old version off to paint something else and then decided to give the scene one more chance and repainted it again. This time I payed more attention to the painting: making the painting part of the picture more interesting and not worrying about how realistic it looked. Which is to say, being a painter of paintings rather than a painter of pictures. I'm a lot happier with this effort. I'll probably keep this one.

18x24" 45x60 cm acrylic on hardboard