The Winter Creek Again

Pretty much the same bend in the creek, just a wider view.

12x24" 30x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Bright Winter

Decided to be fair to winter and do a sunny winter scene along the lines of my last two larger winter pieces. Still keeping it simple, we're painting openness and air here not a conventional landscape. The landscape is the language not the message.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

In the Heart of Winter

All week this was little more than sky and a line of trees. I wanted to do something along the lines of The Blanket of Winter, but not a just re-arrangement of the elements. Yesterday it came to me to combine elements of those watercolor style paintings I did with the more stark and abstrated thick paint winter ones and this is what I ended up with.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Winter Shaded Way

Someone went out painting without his glasses. That, however totally fictional, is my story here. I did rough this in with a more conventional take on the scene, but it struck me as too clunky to ever work so I went this route instead. Pretty much what I wanted to do anyways. It is, by the way, the same basic scene as my earlier Autumn Shaded Way piece, hence it's name.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Blanket of Winter

I wanted to do a larger piece;  I wanted something new to hang over the fireplace. I first tried a view from a height using a small brush but that proved neither detailed enough nor abstract enough to work. So after various other attempts and failures, it came to me just to paint a grey sky and snow: winter without compromise. And it's something I can actually do.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Leaving Kings Cross 2

This is a quota piece: I have a 2 painting a week goal and I was one painting short on Friday. So since someone made a nice comment on my last train painting which I happened to have painted over, I thought I'd do something similar. This is a smaller painting, though I suppose it's hard to tell...

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Winter Moonlight Along the Creek

I painted this over the previously posted train scene. In real life the train painting was just too flat and blah to last. Besides, I'm more comfortable painting vague abstracted scenes rather than specific concrete ones when working with thicker paints. I know the limits of my talent. (I can't manage thick paint.) And my patience. (Life's too short to bother to learn.)

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Leaving Kings Cross

Just playing around. Painted the subject to vaguely I had to give it a concrete title.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Along the Creek in Winter

This is an old dog trying a new trick sort of painting; thin paint brushed haphazardly about for a slightly different effect than my usual haphazard technique.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Winter Day Study

This is exactly what it looks like: a "screw it" painting. I had started a watercolor style painting that somehow I had managed to design with every element I hated/can't do in it: lots of tree trunks, and too many branches and even a cottage instead of a shed. I tried, and then tried to scrub the offending items off and come up with an alternative design, but in the end, I ended up just saying "screw it" (or some such thing...) and put thick paint on the canvas until I came up with something... And this is it.

12x18" 30x45cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

A Farm Yard at Neubridge Lea

Now that the distractions of the holidays are finally over, I can get back to painting. I paint barns and sheds because they are simpler to design and paint than houses. I also don't like painting tree trunks, so I stick my trees behind buildings whenever possible. The branches on the left (somewhat edited out in the photo because of the waviness of the edge line of this piece of canvas after it's been painted on) I put in to frame the painting and create a sense of enclosure or coziness. I really shouldn't do that: I should be brave enough to paint winter open and raw as it is, but not this time...

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor paper

Oak Hollow Farm

This painting is a nice fantasy. I painted it in the middle of a 30 hour snow storm that dumped 20 inches of snow on us. The reality is not fun at all, at least when you get old and have a long driveway to shovel by hand. Winter sucks.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor paper

Of course, after the wind stops howling and the snow blowing and four hours of back breaking work clearing a path to the street and the sun comes out, things look a little prettier.

The end of the shortest day of the year, after a storm.

The Farm Buildings at Haltin Lea

Not a whole lot of sugar coating on this winter painting. I put some warmth in the coloring of the sky, but otherwise, a dull, monotone winter's day with maybe just a hint of the low lying sun breaking through. This is a large painting (for me) and it actually works well because you can't do everything at once with these paintings, so that I can work off and on - 15 minutes, half an hour here and there - over a couple of days, unlike with my more impressionist pieces that are the work of one sitting - if they work at all.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

The Stone Barn

I had my act together this time, technique wise, so this one is a little more polished than my first effort. I'm not sold on the composition, but it is different from my usual. These are sheets of canvas and because they are fabric,  it will tend to shrink a bit because of the water used in the painting of it. Taping it down with masking tape was always hit and miss. This time I tried glueing the edges down to my formica drawing board using acrylic medium and that worked great. I was able to peel it off without a great deal of trouble, though I'l have to experiment on just how little acrylic I'll need to keep it down.

12x18" 30x45cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

Winter at Crofton Grange

A bit out of practice painting in my old watercolor style. One of my headaches in painting in my somewhat unconventional watercolor style was keeping colors from bleeding into each other and creating a muddy, ill defined painting. Winter scenes solve a lot of those problems with the snow keeping objects isolated. For example, the rocks on the right are crisp and distinct. But if this was any other season, I would have to put some sort of colors between then which could (and did, often) make things blurry and muddy. This, by the way, is painted with acrylics on the special watercolor canvas that came out a decade ago. It has its pluses and minuses but on the whole, I like it with acrylics. Watercolors, not so much. The great thing is that you can put repeated washes over the acrylic image without much worry about lifting the old levels, so that you can build up an painting's tone step by step. And you can fix mistakes by scrapping and/or painting over... because acrylic whites will actually cover things, unlike watercolor whites... This is half a 18x24" sheet, so that it could be cropped 2" on the ends to make a more agreeable shape.

12x18" 30x45cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

Pines and Snow Study

Just pushing paint around here, folks.

8x6" 20x15cm acrylic on hardboard

Way of the Grey Crane in Snow

Wouldn't you know, as soon as I start painting snow scenes, it snows. I knew I shouldn't be tempting fate. I had the earlier Way of the Grey Crane painting in mind, but not in front of me when I painted this. This has a little more of the pine tree look that I wanted the first time around but didn't get. This ain't much, but I'm settling for it anyways.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Moorland Gate and Moonlight

After doing a few little pieces that tried to look big, what we have here is an 18x24" piece that looks small. After my first snow study piece I decided to mash up the moonlight paintings with snow and ended up including my coastline study pieces as well in the mix.  I'd actually started out painting an alley scene, but that seemed neither very original nor very interesting and too big (or rather the idea was too small for the size of the board), so after that it was a matter of improvising. I ended up going with simplicity and mood.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

First Snow Study

This is both my first snow painting of the season and is meant to be a painting of the first snow of the season as well. We've had nothing more than a few flakes blowing in the wind around here, which is great, I feel that I've hand my lifetime supply of snow already, but I thought I'd risk tempting fate and paint a snow painting because I didn't know what else to paint. I considered making a large painting of a scene like this, but opted for this little study last night instead, just to see. That's what studies are really for... and as far as I can see, I dodged a bullet in not trying a big one. Still, the painting over the fireplace is getting old and out of season, so I'll have to think of another winter scene to paint...

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 9

Still on the moon light theme. I have used shades of green for night skies in the past, and while not realistic, they seem to work pretty well. As I have mentioned in the past, I consider myself a mere student of painting, and what I am doing is exploring how to paint. I think you have to put in several decades of doing this before you can really master it, and seeing that I'm not even halfway there - with painting in thick paints like oils and acrylic, at any rate -  I'm not yet concerned about where I'm at in the process today, or how each painting turns out (as long as it meets certain vague personal standards). I bring this up only because I realize I've painted variations of this scene, a dozen times: justifiable only because, you see, I'm just practicing...

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Alley in Moonlight

I painted a number of different scenes on this board yesterday and none of them worked. Last night before going to bed I did this, just to play around with the colors. The fact that this is another small piece means that I can just say, 'oh well' and not worry about how unoriginal it all is. Which is nice since it is all I could come up with yesterday...

6x8" 15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

Coastline Study 8

Oh, where to put this little piece? I added just a glimmer of water so that it can fit into the Coastline series.

6x8"15x20cm acrylic on hardboard

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