Island Painting

I once again struggled with interactive acrylics on a beach vacation -- this time my problem was a palette the size of a baseball. Way too small for any real mixing of paint. I think -- in my dream life where I have time for this -- I should be spending time before vacation mixing this paint to see how it's going to work out and then I'll be able make my quick beach sketches work out a bit better.

Deconstructing Buildings

I haven't gotten to resolve much of the right side yet ... and the reflections in the 2-story window/stairwell in the minty green building are way off, but my main concern at this point is breaking down the building shapes to up the abstraction level. This is definitely more complex than painting problems I usually confront, which I hope I'll think is a good thing by the time I finally finish this.

Working on the Bethesda painting

As I'm playing around with color in this painting, I'm also planning the painting that's going to be next to it -- there's a minty green building which housed Gallery Neptune that's just out of view ... and I'm going to paint it and looking a bit to the west in the next work. That's forcing me to keep in mind how the colors are going to work when there's a companion painting. The paintings are too rest hang side by side in my studio easel, so this is going to force me to do some creative studio spacing to get everything to fit.

In January at Bethesda Library there's an artist whose work is going into our display cases... and these paintings are going to go on the wall.

Bethesda in the Rain

I went up to the top floor of a parking garage to get this rainy view looking up Arlington Road in Bethesda. I've got more work to do on this, a lot of work especially on the gray rooftops with mechanical vents and such, but this is the start.

Water

I used to paint a lot of reflections, silver, chrome, bodies of water. Inside today on a rainy afternoon I managed to get out my paints for a short while with only a glass of water for inspiration.

Great Falls

Great Falls, Beautiful Day

I came back to Great Falls to work on the painting, below, that I'd started on Monday. The ground, in particular, needed nuance. I brightened up the sky where the sun was burning through the trees and built up the purple hills in the background (which are the banks of the Potomac in Maryland). There was still time to take a closer look at the trees on the left side of the horizontal painting -- in the new, vertical painting, I was working on a board with a lot of oil and the paint was sliding everywhere. I need to spend more time on the far shore of the Potomac in that painting, which will be the plan for next week. I fully expect that all of the leaves clinging to the trees will be gone by then.

Doing "Nothing" at Great Falls

On the way out to Great Falls, Virginia, today, I passed a political sign that said a candidate for office "Does Nothing." This might have escaped my notice except that last week I was told by my younger admiring daughter that she wanted to do what I did when she was older -- "nothing." So the phrase "doing nothing" was playing in my head like a stuck song. This is the result of doing nothing all morning, proof perhaps (yet again) that the blacker my mood is, the more light and energy end up in my paintings.

Back to Gaithersburg Town Center

I started this a few weeks ago, glad to get back to work on it more. I can't even begin to describe how much happier I was with a palette full of oil paint after a week painting with acrylics.

Last day in Mexico