Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Blue Shadows

16 x 20" oil on mounted linen

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, it's cold. Very cold. It's mostly been too cold to even think of painting outdoors so far this winter. But I've been plugging away at some new studio paintings, including this one.
If you can claim a place just by loving it, this place is taken. I pulled out my artistic license and got rid of the real-estate signs that line the road into this former orchard, with its amazing view overlooking a wide, marshy section of the Mississippi, surrounded by bluffs. Though I rarely use photographs for my paintings, I did stop and take a reference shot one day driving past this place. (See: Weather, too cold to paint outdoors.) The shadows that day were almost impossibly blue, which my camera didn't capture, and I wanted to paint this before the memory faded.