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.