"Now winter nights enlarge, This number of their hours;  And clouds their storms discharge, Upon the airy towers..........."   Thomas Campion

Watercolor and Oil Pastel on gesso'd masonite panel.   This is another painting of southern Idaho, southeast of Pocatello, on Rt 30 ......wanted to try and capture an approaching storm against the low mountain range.....

                     

"Thru the Thicket-Across the Meadow-To the Woods"

                                 2nd attempt at "Summer Green" ....  Acrylic 11"x14"

Watercolor Progression

Same location as the painting in the previous blog entry... Pushed in a little more Raw Umber into this one...... Of note:  Windsor Newton makes two different Payne's Grays.....The Windsor Newton brand and the Windsor Newton Cotman brand of Payne's Gray.  I prefer the Cotman brand of Payne's Gray mixed with various earth tones.

                                                             Watercolor   9"x16"

                                       "Summer Green"  Acrylic on canvas.......11" x 14"

"All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me..."   Phillip Pulfrey; from Love, Abstraction, and other Speculations

                                                             Preparatory Sketches

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of earth are never alone or weary of life."   Rachel Carson

                                         Southern Idaho...watercolor and acrylic

      A quick watercolor sketch for color/composition.  I do a lot of these upright free-flowing paintings just to keep myself familiar with the medium.  This one however was accomplished on gesso'd 300# paper, using Derivan liquid pencil, Gouache, and some cobalt blue watercolor in the sky area.  I half-way finish them and then end up liking them in this loose unfinished look.

                                         This evening...a quick sketch from photo references

                                                         Oil and Oil Pastel on Canvas

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out until sundown;  For going out, I found, I was really going in".     John Muir; The unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

                             

                         Winter with new growth pines .....Watercolor and Acrylic   (11"x14")

Working in the studio today from sketches and photographs.... This is another painting of the mountain rocks along Tony Grove Lake, Utah

"Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world."    Norman Maclean, A River Runs through it and other stories

"He, the Mountain.....
A beauty he is with his sparkling grey face,  looking up at the sun, his arms embrace..."    
Dahlia Pimentel  

This is the completed painting that I had posted earlier as an unfinished piece.  Not a whole lot of changes.... just added some color to that rocky left side of the painting and reposted it as a finished painting.   At some time, I'll make another trip to this location to do some more painting....

                "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin"        William Shakespheare

                                                                   Acrylic 11"x14"

This is my 2nd acrylic of this scene.  I painted one very similar to this one and posted it on this blog on 30 January.  I enjoyed painting it and liked the composition, so I thought I'd try another with a slight variation from the first.  On this painting I put down a little more paint with a pallet knife.

                                               
                                             Acrylic on 400# rough Arches' W/C paper

"Nature is man's teacher.  She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart..."   Alfred Billings Street

       
           

"How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude".    Emily Dickinson

A couple of watercolors from an area around Logan, Utah...Late February 2014

   

                           

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.

"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...

"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…..

 "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not"  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Top…further work on the painting shown below...almost finished and this is where I'm at.  The way I have it now appeals to me, so I think I'll just leave it alone and let it rest for awhile…. a slight variation from my usual stuff, but then again it's still another small painting at 11" x 14".  Of note:  My wife says the colors in this painting makes her nauseous and it's definitely not one of her favorites.

Bottom…started this acrylic landscape yesterday evening.  I think I'm wanting to do something with less detail…something a little different then my normal...