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. 

Still Waters Run Deep: Painting Water, Land and Sky

Still Waters Run Deep

20" x 24"  acrylic on canvas SOLD

This tiny rocky island lies off a big island on Redstone Lake (in Ontario) where I am fortunate to spend time each summer in a small rustic cottage. Over the years I have taken many photos of this little island while we have paddled around the big one, and they have been starting points for several paintings.  Each interpretation, however, has been quite different. I really like the saturated palette, and the lightness of those hues reminds me of summer air and light. Lately I have been quite interested in pushing my landscape shapes and forms towards greater degrees of simplification and abstraction, and I think it has worked quite well here. Have a wonderful summer day.

Midnight Magic Painting - More Imagination than Reality

Midnight Magic

24" x 36"  acrylic on canvas 

This painting, like so much of my work, is based on a photo. In this case it was one that I took at my cottage one fabulous afternoon in late May, several years ago. The day was unseasonably warm, and the blue blue sky was full of big, fluffy clouds. Their perfect reflection in the calm lake water was amazing, and the stillness made the moment magical.

I have tried to paint this scene several times, but, despite loving the memory of the day and place, found the relentless symmetry, ultimately uninteresting. I realized that what I really wanted to paint were the reflections in the water, and continue to explore this subject in an abstracted, stylized way. Boldness and imagination seemed in order.....thus the photo became a point of departure.

I started this 'new' work last spring, envisioning a very different scene from the photo view - with a dramatic night sky and an even more dramatic interpretation of the water and reflections. The latter, as you can see, is highly imagined, and was great fun to paint. However, but it took all summer to figure out what to do with the sky. Originally I had sketched in some simplified clouds, but they just seemed to take up space and look wrong. When I returned to this canvas a few days ago I worked at the clouds for a while but they didn't improve, so then I painted them out and had an aha! moment, realizing that a simpler cloudless sky would work much better (whether it makes sense logically doesn't really matter), and offer a perfect visual counterpoint to the wild water below. And I think it does, quite successfully.

Happy Canada Day!

I painted this work last year while at my cottage in the Haliburton Highlands - cottage country Ontario - a great place to celebrate summer and July 1st - Canada Day! Enjoy!

Redstone Lake Island
20" x 16" - acrylic on canvas 
This is for sale - contact me for price if interested.