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.