In Search of a Landscape

This little back road led from Chateau de Panisseau to the little village of Cunege.  We had arrived at our gite and were stretching our legs when a little car zipped by and screeched to a halt.  "Meetch!" we heard from the car.  It was our friend, Andre, a sculptor and mayor of a nearby village.  Suddenly the world didn't seem so large.  The painting proved overly complex, and will take more time if I want to tackle it again in earnest.  The dappled sunlight on the dirt road will take some careful brushwork to seem less splotchy, and the light at the curve in the distance might want to be slightly cooler.

Chateau de Panisseau

Morning at George Rogers Park

This is from a recent morning walk, and the light was dramatic and uplifting.  I was concerned about adding the beach in the foreground, worried that the angle detracted from the composition, and I think I was right.  I'd rather try it without.

This is another view from near the beach, looking back up Oswego Creek to the footbridge.  All three of these landscapes seem to have in common the focal point in the upper center.

Variations

12x12 oil on board

This is a take on a plein air study I did last week, and I'm trying to push myself in a slightly different direction, though I don't feel I'm there yet.  This is a little bend in the Tualatin River where Randall Tipton and I set up on a nice foggy morning.  My paintings didn't go along these lines and were crudely representational, as is my bent, but there was something in the color that I wanted to work with.  But when I started into this one, the color got abandoned in search of something else, something a little more abstracted.  This photo is not good: the warms are too warm and the cools are too warm, too, not quite like I was going for.  But the conversation on the riverbank as we sat there painting was exceptionally fulfilling, as usual.

Another couple of landscapes from this week.  The first is a detail from a larger painting that is a bust, but there was something about those poplars as I drove past, with the blue of the mountain behind showing through, but it might take revisiting at some point.

The last one is a simple little sketch of a hillside near where I walk the dog on Luscher Farms; the fallow fields, the working farm still going on so close to the city, a private little space tucked in the hills near the commotion of modern life.  I don't know why this one appeals to me so much; maybe I'm just imagining what Pissaro might have done with it.