Spring 2014

We've been quite busy the last few weeks, but I still got around to doing several paintings. I did this one for our friends Christina and Mike, and it is the two of their horses that they brought on our yearly horse camping trip last September. On the left is Aurora, a beautiful blue roan mare. Roan horses have a mixture of light and dark hair that makes their coat kind of shimmer. It's not easy to capture that effect in a painting or a photo, but it was worth a try. On the right is Wiz, Aurora's son, a buckskin gelding. They are both really nice horses, and we enjoyed being with them. I find painting animals to be a lot more challenging than most other kinds of subjects, but it wouldn't be as much fun if it was easy.

The first assignment of the spring session of my watercolor class was to paint some Plumeria, a Hawaiian flower. This was an exercise in using masking fluid. It was based on one of Ron Pratt's photos. After masking the flowers, the green background was done as a wet-on-wet wash. Our teacher, Ron, left his background as a blur of greens, but I couldn't resist adding some darker greens to make some stems and leaves. I'm not familiar with this flower, so I can't tell whether my painting looks anything like the real thing, but I like it anyway.

It seems that I'm not done with my urge to paint scenes of the high sierra. And I'm not done with trying to capture reflections in lakes. This is from a photo that I took in August, 2008 on a backpacking trip with my friend, Gerald. It is early morning at Ruby Lake, at about 11,000 ft. in the Rock Creek area between Mammoth and Bishop. Once again, I ended up with a lot of muddy colors in the reflection, but I feel like I did better than previous attempts at this kind of scene. I have several other nice photos from this trip that would be fun to paint. In fact, I've already started on one of them, and you may see it here soon.

I know that some artists and photographers don't like to specify the exact locations of their landscapes because they want people to focus on their art, not the place it represents. They also don't want their special places overrun by people trying to copy what they have done. I don't feel that way. As one who has had a lifetime obsession with maps, specific places are very important to me and I want to share them with others. I feel that so many people today have very little contact with the natural world, and if I can encourage someone to get outdoors and maybe get a bit sweaty and dirty, I've done a good thing.