Some Recent Things

 Lately I've been picking up where I left off on some of the many unfinished studio paintings I've amassed over the last few years. Working with very limited energy due to chronic and sometimes acute illness, much of my work has been sidelined in the mess of sickness and uncertainty, as rest and treatment necessarily took priority. 

 I'm grateful to be gaining in strength again and finding joy in picking up the brush again. 

 This little painting was done sitting out in the fields towards the end of an autumn day a couple of years ago. The light didn't last long with those moody clouds moving in, but there was something so lovely about the leaves clinging onto the little grove of cottonwood trees and their ruddy oak and hickory neighbors, and the patterns of the fields and pasture on the hillside.

October 24, 2024; 10 x 10" plein air oil on linen/birch

 I began the larger piece that night, while the memory and feeling was still fresh. It was on and off the easel over the next year and months, and at last I'm calling it complete. Some things are quite different from the smaller field study, but I think they both tell something of the same story.

 

Waiting; 24 x 24" oil on linen/birch.

 

Another, from earlier in 2024, painted January 7th, which is when Christmas is celebrated in some branches of Christianity. My Grandpa made this star many years ago, and it became tradition to hang it on this beautiful old maple tree throughout the Christmas season until Epiphany is celebrated.

10 x 7" plein air oil on linen/birch

 I loved the way its light caught the twisting branches, and the warm glow contrasting with the deepening blue of the twilight. I knew I hadn't had enough of the scene and, again, I started a slightly larger piece right away.

And then it sat, waiting for me. Two years later, I was able to come back to it. As always, it seems, there are things lost and gained when going from a plein air piece to a studio piece. I appreciate both.

 

Old Calendar Christmas, 16 x 12" oil on linen/birch.

 There are many more beginnings and "almosts" waiting for me, and I'm hopeful about continuing to get back to them, learning as I go, and sharing these places and moments, interpreted in paint, in the near-ish future.

Still needing to take things slowly and more carefully, I didn't get out painting as much this winter as I would wish. But this one was fun: painted on a bright, moonlit night, a study of tracks in the snow.

 

January 30, 2026, 10 x 8" plein air oil on linen/birch.

There was so much more to the surrounding scene, though! And I wondered if I could show more of that in a studio painting. I remembered how the tops of the poplar trees showed in the night, and two stars gleamed out, bright enough to still be visible in a sky brightened by the full moon.

Moonlight and Starlight; 20 x 16" oil on linen/birch.

I saw the moon peeking through the clouds early one morning as the night was softening into day, and I wanted to put it down in paint while the impression was fresh in my mind. I made a quick, rough little sketch of the moon and clouds, and later did another sketch out in the field to get a better grasp of the layout of the land below. Then it was paint-time.

Early Morning Winter Moon; 12 x 16" oil on linen/birch.

I've been spending some time out in the orchard in this late winter and early spring, sometimes more- and sometimes less-successfully studying apple trees and snow. After one such outing, as I made my way out from among the trees and looked towards the woods, I was stopped in my tracks: the moon was just coming up, glowing a brilliant orange through the trees.

I had to try to catch something of the feeling of the moment, and this painting is the result.

Molten Moonrise; 14 x 18" oil on linen/birch.

 

And here's one last share, a painting from last fall which I finally had properly photographed. One night in September, as the fields were all decked out in a glory of goldenrod and wild asters, I picked a big bouquet of them and carried it home with me. Somehow that night and those wildflowers were a gift, and I wanted to hold onto it forever.

Dreams; September, 2025, 16 x 20" plein air oil on linen/birch.

  I spent the next five days with it, switching out some of the flowers with fresh ones as I went, painting  and scraping and trying again. I painted this outdoors, which had the advantage of the beautiful natural light that I wasn't able to get indoors, but the disadvantage of giving me a very limited window in which to work each day.

I loved the unruliness of these wildflowers, the goldenrod heavy with brilliant pollen and the asters like a white and purple cloud.

 

- Hannah