New Paintings

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard "Road in the Pines"

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard "Garden Wall Study"

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard "Seashore Study"

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard "Valley Morning"

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard "Lonely Lane"

My current goal is to paint one painting a week. I'm a bit ahead of that goal, but it'll probably average out. Garden Wall Study and Lonely Lane are the pieces that are closest to what I'm looking to paint.

Painting a day so far

All 6x8" 15x20 cm acrylic on hardboard

Just doing one small painting a day to try to get back in the swing of things. The last two are more or less the same scene, just using different sized brushes.

New Work

Paddock with Sheep 18x24" 45x60cm

Autumn Idea 12x16" 30x40cm

Untitled 6x8" 15x20cm

Untitled 6x8" 15x20cm

It's been the better part of nine months since I last painted anything and I'm not really all fired up about it even now. No new ideas. But our six month long winter has arrived and I've time on my hands so I think I'll give painting a go. It is, however, a hard go. I'd hoped to have some new ideas; ways to do things or at least new motifs, but sadly that isn't the case. Rather discouraging. However nothing will get done unless you do something, so I'm going to paint a piece a day and see what if anything develops. I'm going to make it easy though and just do small pieces like the last two on this post... We'll see.

The End

And so it ends in static. I've found it increasingly hard to paint -- and to paint something I haven't painted before -- over the last year or two and I must admit that the pool of inspiration I was drawing on seems to have run dry. Whether or not it's spring fed and will fill again remains to be seen, but for now I think it's time to give painting a rest. Maybe I'll try some other type of art. At the moment though, writing is what I'm enjoying doing. Painting with words. I'm posting the first five parts of my open ended science fiction story, Captain of the Lost Star on my deviantART site (link on the right) and will post some other stories as well. I'm finishing up the second draft of part six, and will be starting part 7 shortly. I might try my hand at illustrating them, but we'll see. In short, still feeling creative, but not in a painting way.

Thanks for looking in over the years. You can keep tabs on what I'm up to on my DeviantART site.

Early Morning in Winter, Bayport Road

Besides trying to get away with the least possible work or thinking, the main purpose of this piece was to explore the differences in colors between the sky and the shadows on the snow. I was up when the sun was just coming up the other day and noted (again) how the lightest of blue-green skies contrast with the dull blue grey of the snow in the shadows. This piece is an attempt to capture that effect. I was using a small brush to make the sky less boring, but that didn't work as well as I wanted. And well, this is one of those paintings that doesn't photograph well either, so this photo result is less than accurate. I had to go out into the snow to take the picture and it was snowing, so I didn't feel like trying it again. That's my story anyways. But you get the idea.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

The Old Woman and Her Dog

Oh, why not? Hardboard and acrylic paint are cheap enough. Really this is more iffy than the last post, but it does have a nice simplicity about it.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard.

Moonlight and the River at Wovenlay Park

This is a somewhat more tamed version of last night's painting. It's a little more literal interpertaion of what the title describes than the original version. The place comes from a previous picture somewhere in this blog, and was more or less what I was aiming to paint at some point in this painting, though far from what I started out to paint.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard