High Over the Hills

Just trying to paint little pictures that look big.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

November Sunset 2

The morning's painting. I suppose if this piece was done in my large 18x24' size, it would pretty much be in my usual style, but seeing that it's a 6x8" piece, it is quite restrained for me.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

November Sunset

My new project is to paint landscapes as classically as I can using a small brush and trying to show as few brushstrokes as I can. Of course, recognizing my limited attention span to details and time, I'm doing this on a small scale: the usual 6x8" board.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Marsh Study 2

Inconsequential. But small, so what the heck?

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Marsh Study

We have a lot of them around here. I''ve got mixed feelings about being so casual (sloppy) about some things, like the sky in this case where you can plainly see how I sculpted the tree line. On one hand it may be an annoying distraction, but on the other, much of my painting is about spontaneity and a certain 'deal with it' attitude. I think 'study' in the title lets me get away with it.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Rainy Afternoon

Don't know quite what this is: all I know is that it's been a bit of a hard slog painting the last several days and we'll just have to take what we get.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 7 New

As I suspected, I could not bring myself to accept the previous no. 7 so this is what I eventually ended up with. It ain't much either, but will have to do. You can see how low the sun is in the afternoon around here these days by all the shadows thrown by my brush marks in this photo.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 7

If this wasn't a small painting, and I didn't suspect that this is one of those boards that will always give me trouble, I'd paint over this one. I might still.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 6

This came out a with a rather highlandish air to it, which wasn't my intent, but works for me.

6x8" 15x30cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 5

In my bookkeeping system this acrylic 1000 and as such, somewhat of a milestone. It is however, not actually my 1000th acrylic painting. At one time I did fifty some small paintings like this and numbered them as "bookshelf paintings" even though they were done in acrylics. And then there are the paintings I've painted over. How do you count them?  In any event, some I've painted over I've kept the same number, others got a new number, so who knows when I crossed the 1000 mark. Still, in the little over 9 years since I quit my day job to paint, I've done around 250 oil paintings, 50 some watercolors and over a 1000 acrylics and that's not counting all the watercolors I did before I became a painter. Even at my minimum price of 1000K each, I'm rich! Now if I were 27 instead of 63 and people where actually buying my pieces at 1000K plus, what a fine dissipated artistic life I could be leading... I suppose, in the end, a bulled dodged...

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

After an Evening Shower (Once again)

One of the things wrong with the first version was the colors. I decided that there was no reason to do an fall scene, so I made it a summer scene instead. I also changed the composition somewhat and adopted my "I couldn't care less" style of painting to get a rather casual, scruffy painting. I think it worked.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 4

Keeping it simple.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

After an Evening Shower

I felt that this painting should be better, somehow. I've repainted it several times over the last two days and have made little progress, and I guess I'm just wrong. Oh well.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 3

Sticking with painting the edges of the day.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 2

I'm not sure where this series is going. I had to change the name once already. We'll see, I guess.

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 1

Not sure where I'm going with this series so I'm keeping the title pretty generic. I am going to paint in lanscape mode this time around. That should keep things different from the last two series. I painted this one with the same brush I've painted all the other small paintings this fall, and there ain't much  brush left to it, mostly just pushing paint around with it's nub, which is what accounts for the sky.

6x8" 15x29cm acrylic on hardboard

Back Courts After Rain

Painted this piece as an antidote to the outline paintings I have been doing recently on this particular locale. Had some trouble, almost went outline anyway, but I changed to a bigger brush and got more of the effects I wanted going into it.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 14

I think this will be the last in this series. Once I get around to painting snow scenes we may return to this general subject. Who knows?

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

A Forest Lane

Just playing around and since it did not really fit with the current series, it get it's own name.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 13

Still playing around with painting over the board with colors and then scraping the wet paint off and using the remaining stains as the basis for what happens in the painting when I start adding more paint to it.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 12

In this painting I deliberately painted over the whole board and then scraped the paint off leaving only a stain and proceeded to paint the sky to create the shape of the trees and paint over the lower half to create the foreground.  The joy in these paintings is the role chance and spontaneity play in their creation. Mostly what I do is lightly edit them to make them into some sort of scene. Painting without   care.

8x6" 29x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 10 & 11

Above is number 11 in this series, below number 10, both done today. I took out a couple of bigger boards to paint on, and put them back. Too much work. Right now I'm pretty addicted to these small studies on a theme...

both 8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

A Dampish Sort of Evening

I can't quite see this fitting into the Fall into Winter series, so it gets a title of it's own. A large part of the tree on the right is just what paint was left after I scrapped off earlier ideas and then painted the sky around it to give it some shape.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 9

If these were not small little paintings who's main purpose is to give me something to do and maybe something to discover; studies on a theme, as it where, I'd feel rather embarrassed about how repetitive certain features of these paintings are. But as it is: they're just studies of certain features, compositions and painting styles.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Croyhill Lane

This is the outline style painting I've been playing with for the last two days. As you can see I pretty much reverted to the nearsighted, fuzzy style of Back Courts Afternoon. That was not my intention, but I found that the scene  I came up with was just too cartoonish to be done either semi-realistically, or in the more straight up and down graphic arts style of hard lines and flat colors of the first small one. I don't think this worked, but oh, well, if you want assured success you don't go around trying new ways of doing things, which is pretty much the fun of painting.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 8

I wanted to make a sunny one this time around, so let's pretend those are red oaks that hold on to their leaves well into winter... That's my story anyways.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 7

Another gloomy day here, weather wise anyways. In other ways, it a rather fine day.

8x6" 20x1`5cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 5 & 6

I think I'm beginning to get into my stride with this series. Given the basically drab colors of late fall around here, it takes some doing to make something interesting and of them.  Above is no. 6 below is no. 5

both are 8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 5

Well, at last we have a piece with the color pallet I was looking for in this series. I resisted using snow this time around as well. It's just too early, though I saw some yesterday...

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

A Back Court in Shadows

Here's another take on using outlines in a painting. I started out making the edges of things a darker shade, but I was not very consistant with that. In the end it's pretty much of a hodgepodge of things with outlines and things without. However, I see no real need to be doctrinal about these things. Something different from the last one anyways.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 3

I seem to be having a great deal of trouble doing what I set out to do with this series. The late fall colors: browns and greys just haven't worked. I think that when I add snow to the mix (and I'm in no hurry to do that yet...) I can get them to work, but without the blank spaces that snow creates, all the gloomy colors just look plain gloomy. That and leafless trees are another issue...

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall into Winter 2

This was another one of them boards that didn't want to cooperate. I decided just to settle for this. And it really falls more into the last series than this one, but I didn't want to go back...

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Back Court Afternoon

Well, here's the fuzzier version of the outline style. The nearsighted version so to speak. I'll have to think about how to do things other than the outline: how to place things and color them and such, but as to the question is it better than a hard outline? Don't know yet.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall Alley Outline

This was pretty much accidental. I had started a scene similar to the what I've been doing and had put in a few lines in for the buildings a bit darker than necessary, and when looking at it I decided to go this route instead. The key here is to do it sloppy. If you make neat it looks mechanical or like simple computer art/design. I want it to look like a painting. However, I would like to have the outlines a lot less lines and more like a gradual darkening, a gradient between the color sections. I'm going to have to see how I can do that...

8x10" 20x25cm acrylic on hardboard