mountains
Bird’s Eye
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Above: Bird’s Eye, 12 x 12 x 3 inches acrylics on canvas, gallery wrapped sides painted, finished Oct.13th, 2009
Bird’s Eye, 11 x 11 x 3 inches acrylics on canvas. Signed on the side, so a signature iss superimposed on the front. March 3rd: above, February 28: thumbnails below
Painting facelift
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Started April 7th this year, Rocky Mountain Vista recieved a facelift this week before I brought it in to be judged for a local exhibition. There are subtle but positive improvements compared to when I posted it as finished on April 13th. Progress can be reviewed on the April 9th blog post. It is now truly finished!
Rocky Mountain Vista finished
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
Above: Rocky Mountain Vista detail images
Left: Complete image, 48 x 24 x 2 inches, Acrylics on canvas, gallery wrapped sides painted. Paintings that are proportionately longer than wider don’t photograph well or show impressively on screen, so this has been split into three seperate detail images.
Progress on Rocky Mountain Vista
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
Rocky Mountain Vista 48 x 24 inches Acrylics on stretched canvas after one more day of work, still in progress and almost finished.
Rocky Mountain Vista
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Started last night, work in progress: Rocky Mountain Vista 48 x 24 inches Acrylics on stretched canvas.
Takkakaw Falls
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
Takkakaw Falls, Yoho Valley, B.C. 830 feet high, said to be the most impressive waterfalls in North America.
12 x 9 inches pencil, watercolors, based on antique Vandyck photos of the Canadian Rockies.
New series of watercolor studies
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Mt. Assiniboine, about forty miles southwest of Banff, Alberta. 12 x 9 inch watercolor/pencil study.
I inherited some charming antique books of hand-colored Vandyck Photogravures of Canadian Rocky Mountains scenery as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.
The montone sepia and few other pale colors add such a warmth to the already beautiful scenery in the 1910 photographs, and since I haven’t tried watercolors for years I thought they would make perfect studies.
Gold In The Mountains #1
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Gold In The Mountains #1, finished - 20 x 16 x 1 inches Acrylics on stretched canvas. Mounted on a box-frame, extending out 2 extra inches on canvas-covered background, with rustic barn-wood finished edges.
This is one of those paintings that never felt truly finished until this week. Started late in 2005, it has evolved through many changes. The first thumbnail shows the painting at a stage where I thought it finished and entered it into Artjury.com’s 2006 Spring/Summer online exhibition, and it was accept ed. At the time I liked the larger areas of flat orange-gold, but about six months later after it had been stored out of sight I felt that the work needed more depth, so began a long process of repainting, scrubbing off, build-up, scraping, etc. The painting reached a few different stages where it could have been called finished, but I was not entirely pleased, so continued.
One never knows beginning any painting, how long it will take.. The image above shows the painting as it is today, now well and truly finished! Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge and view a few stages in the life of Gold In The Mountains #1.
Gold In The Mountains #2
Sunday, April 2nd, 2006
Gold In The Mountains #2 ~ 11 x 14 Oil Pastels, framed 22 x 26 inches
Poplar Trees (Aspen) in the Rocky Mountains during Autumn display large golden-yellow masses of leaves, represented here with strokes in diagonal direction. Tree trunks are marked vertically across the entire page, grounding the drawing as a whole compositionally. The green-black portion displays the vertical growth of evergreens. Less obvious are the horizontal strokes I felt were appropriate for the mountain, softening its nature and place it back in distance.