Island on Redstone

Island on Redstone

18" x 20" - acrylic on canvas - $300

I have tried to paint this particular view of a small island - it is just trees and some rocks - near my cottage on Redstone Lake in Haliburton, several times. This time, however, I am quite happy with the result. I think the very stylized forms and expressive palette 'work' - and are more interesting than the reality: green trees on a grey lake, with a grey sky and grey-green background hills.

Hope that you are having a wonderful weekend!

Shoreline Blues - a Daily Paintworks "Pick of the Day" on DPW-FB

Shoreline Blues

24" x 30" - acrylic on canvas - $400

In between drawing and painting views of Scotland (inspired by photos from a recent trip there) I have also been painting views inspired by my present location, at a cottage on a beautiful lake in Haliburton County, in northern 'cottage-country' Ontario. This painting is based on a photo I took from a canoe. 
                                                      
I worked on this painting after Highland Landscape and used a similar wet-into-wet-acrylic-wash technique to apply the paint and build up layers of colour as you can see in these progress photos. 

At this point I began to add more opaque colours and though it  appears less 'transparent' than Highland Landscape, some of that spontaneity has been maintained. I have been thinking about this particular scene and composition for a long time and am happy to have finally painted it (done!) and i am really happy with this way it turned out. I love the graphic nature of the composition, the abstracted reflection shapes, and the analogous colour palette. 

Northern Escape - More Rocks and Trees

Northern Escape
16" x 18"  - acrylic on canvas -  SOLD

I seem to be flipping back and forth between painting Provence landscapes and northern Ontario landscapes these days. Perhaps I am feeling nostalgic about my painting experience in France as I love sifting through those photos, but at the same time I am surrounded by the rugged beauty of mixed forests, dark blue lakes, dramatic skies, and rocky shorelines - what we call cottage country in Ontario.

This painting encapsulates the physical nature of this kind of landscape, and I hope the spirit too. My preliminary drawing was a quick one, and more abstract then I intended the painting to be. As I painted this one I kept thinking about the drawing and so I started a second more abstract version, and worked on both of them at the same time. More on that one in my  next post.

Ontario Northland

Ontario Northland

30" x 40" -  acrylic on canvas  

SOLD

I finally finished this work, one of the two landscape paintings that I had been working on before Christmas. Both  were challenging and unresolved in different ways, so I decided to leave them in hopes that I would find a way through to completion.

When I posted this in December it looked like this....

.....and though I really liked palette, loose forms and surface brushwork, there were areas I felt needed more development. And, once again, I went from looseness to control, but I also really like the result.