Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Another Field Study
Since returning home I've been looking over the paintings, photos and sketches I did in New Harmony. While there, I only did a few oil sketches. Most of my time was spent with pastels. This little oil sketch was also one of my paintings stamped for field to finish. Looking solely at this sketch it seems busy but when I got to looking at it and the photo it is quite simplified. The farm this scene was located at was just loaded with potential paintings and I will returning there next year as well. This sketch probably will not be used for the competition but it will be re-examined and turned into something else. Yesterday I started doing small pastel studies of the few sketches I got done on site. So far I'm really excited with what has been happening with them. Soon I will begin the largest paintings I've done to date and these sketches are giving me a lot of confidence and ideas to run with.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

First Brush of Spring
During this past week and weekend the First Brush of Spring happened in New Harmony Indiana. It was my first time at the event and I really enjoyed it. Artist were allowed to enter work that was done from Thursday morning up to Saturday morning into a contest Saturday afternoon. The winner of the show was an oil painting by Jeanne McLeish http://www.home.earthlink.net/~burkettmcleish/. The composition was killer and the color was amazing. I don't have a picture of it but hopefully she will have it up on her website soon. 

The whole experience was memorable. I had the chance to stay and paint with Larry Rudolech http://www.rudolech.com/ and also paint with Wyatt LeGrand http://www.legrandartstudio.com/.  I got meet two artist from arkansas, Jason Sacran http://jasonsacran.com/, and John Lasater http://home.centurytel.net/Lasater/home.html that I'd never seen before. They had some awesome work that I really enjoyed looking at. Those are just a few of the amazing artist there. Check out Indiana plein air painters website http://www.inpainters.org/ for some of the other artist there and perhaps photos from the show soon.

Anyway the painting above was done from the Indiana shore looking across to Illinois. The sun was going down and the scene had to be painted. The composition and color were something I couldn't have thought up better myself with all the time in the world. I had this piece and a few others stamped for next years field to finish. This will most likely be the entry for that show.