A week or so ago, I went hiking in Sunol Regional Park. I saw lots of nice scenery but not too much that inspired me to paint it. But as I was walking along, something drew my eye to this grouping of oaks on a dry hillside. Years ago, I would have just let it go by, thinking that it wasn't worth wasting film on, but now when something catches my eye, I can just pull our my iphone and snap a photo. I thought it would be just another throw-away shot, but when I looked at my photos later, this one was the only one of many that I thought I would like to paint. Something about the arrangement of the trees and the shadows spreading down from the center said something to me. Something that couldn't be put in words. The red poison oak on the left adds something too. It is pretty loose and quickly done, but I like it a lot.
My painting class started up again a couple of days ago, and I needed something to work on in class. I remembered that I had a shot of a little cottontail bunny that I shot on our trip this summer. I also had another photo of the distant view from the same spot as the bunny, and I thought I could combine the two. This was on highway 40 at the Utah-Colorado border just south of Dinosaur National Monument. I hoped it would show the difference in scale between the bunny's world of rocks and grass, and the wide open spaces of plains and mountains. Instead, is seems to bring them together, which maybe is what I had in mind anyway. Maureen thinks the bunny looks too big. That's probably the result of combining a close-up shot with a distant view. I suppose I could have done better with the perspective. It's another quickly done painting, but I like it.
