Several watercolors ... same location.

"I hear the wind among the trees, Playing the celestial symphonies;  I see the branches downward bent, Like keys of some great instrument."    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes..........,
I love not man the less, but Nature more. "
(George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage)
Edge of woods .....  6 1/2" x 6 1/2" watercolors

Working in my studio today......An autumn painting from photographs taken along route 36 on my way towards Montpelier, Idaho in October 2013.  I had painted one similar to this one several months ago which is shown in an earlier blog posting.  On this particular painting I used a Yellow Ochre Gouache to achieve a more opaque feel in the aspen trees...

"Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."
William Cullen Bryant

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind......Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky, That dost not bite so nigh as benefits forgot:"  (William Shakespeare)

Today...The result of painting in my studio today and listening to some nice Mozart classical music….really relaxing to the mind.  I've been concentrating a lot of effort these past 2 weeks in painting mountain winter scenes that are a part of much of the Utah landscapes…I enjoy these types of paintings and it might be difficult to transition back into a spring /summer presentation….so i will need to get out there again when it warms up.
This is the beginning of an acrylic painting that I treated as a watercolor and painted it on 300 # Arches' rough natural white paper…. I'm going to let it set for awhile and then make a decision on how much further I want to go on it in the middle/foreground.
For some reason I almost think it's there except for some minor things to straighten out on it....I really don't want to lose the significance of those distant barely visible trees, and if I were to build up the foreground to much I'm afraid that might happen.

"Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though;  He will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow……..The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep".    (Robert Frost)

                       Another winter landscape in watercolor  "What remains of Autumn"

"The mountain-top seems uplifted solitary to the gates of Heaven itself;  remote in air of such crystal purity that the whole being is 'tiptoe for flight'................"  (Memoirs of Louise Lawrence)

 Enjoy painting in the winter time, but just a small break from the painting of snow scenes….. Watercolor...Cache Valley, Utah..."Autumn High Country".  That dark gray color in the aspens is a color new to me that I found from Daniel Smith's colors called "graphite gray".  I did a wet-n-wet, just dropping the gray color in straight out of the tube and letting it run.  I think I'm going to try this again soon, but will mask off to get the white trunks of the aspen trees...

      "The wintery season brings on the opportunity to set your eyes upon the very bones of nature"     (unknown)



"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape.  Something waits beneath it;  the whole story doesn't show."   (Andrew Wyeth)

These past few days we've been receiving inches and inches and inches of snow.  So...for this mornings watercolor…. a snow sketch.   Soon I think I'll need to make a trip to the woods to sketch, paint, and photograph…more snow scheduled for today though.  Another day it will have to be I think.

"O thou whose face hath felt the winter's wind, Whose eyes has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist, And the black elm tops 'mong freezing stars"  (John Keats)

This is the finished painting…...An Acrylic and Watercolor on 400# Arches' paper that was started on the 23rd of January and then set aside for awhile.  Shown on that earlier blog page when it was 1/2 finished.

"Trees need not walk the earth for beauty or bread; Beauty will come to them where they        stand…Beauty will come to them in the rainbow - the sunlight - and the lilac-haunted rain."                     (David Rosenthal)

Small (8"x8") project demonstrations using Gouache, Watercolor, and Windsor Newton Soft Pastels (Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, and Brown Ochre).  The 300# watercolor paper I used was gesso'd with several coats to give me a very heavy thick surface to work on.  After these paintings was finished, they were sprayed with fixative to hold it all in place and then later varnished in a satin finish.  (Posted earlier on this blog in November)

"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand…. I think, I too, have known autumn too long".     (EE Cummings)

A couple of sketches from the past few days…..