Keep coming back

No matter what experiments I do or how much joy I get from going out to the woods to paint en plein air, when I'm in the studio I always seem to come back to the face. Even when I'm doodling on the phone I find myself scribbling profiles and different angles of faces. So on this cold February week I find myself in the sunny studio working on this... like this new palette I've been trying in various tones of color. This is 30 x 30 acrylics.

Purple Mud Too

Decided to paint another version of the purple mud I saw out in the Croatan National Forest (Patsy Pond) in a more panoramic size...this is 18 x 36 in acrylics... Sometimes the mud is purple, sometimes blue...

Purple Mud

Out in the woods in the Croatan National Forest, I saw this gorgeous purple mud. Here's my attempt to capture it on canvas.

Another splash

This one looks like a person (on the right) walking on a windy day.... could have been me walking my dog Theo this morning... see the post below for another done in a similar manner....

Splash

Over the last couple weeks I've been experimenting with liquid acrylics on large canvases - creating interesting texture. This one is made up of four separate 3' x 3' canvases - put together it is 6 x 6 feet. I love the color and texture. Now I'm trying to decide whether to stop here and let the viewer pull out what they see hidden inside, or whether I should pull out a face or a figure that I see. The latter feels sort of like "imposing my will" on the painting - but that's often what we do as painters... anyhow I'm leaning at this point in leaving it open. There are so many different angles to do - I've been rearranging the squares to find new compositions!

Golden

Sometimes I like to cover a canvas with a pattern or texture and then sit back and look at it at different angles and over time. Eventually I start to see something that I like and I work to "pull it out." This is one such canvas - I loved the golden texture I had created and then this face started to appear to me so I helped her along a bit.

New oil

Today I grabbed a 30 x 40 canvas on which I had quickly "sketched" in paint a gestural nude this fall. It was a nice day so I worked outside with the new rich oils I've described before from Blue Ridge. Made a conscious effort NOT to render detail, but to try to keep the looseness of the sketch at the same time experimenting with color and shape. I really like this start...think its almost done - might just go back in and add a little more color to the face and some blue to her left shoulder, but am going to let it sit and look at it again tomorrow with fresh eyes before doing any more.

Sometimes you lose the freshness of the paint if you go back in and mess around too much. We'll see.