Working with the "Make It Work" Pile of Watercolors:

For a variety of reasons, paintings don't get finished and when that happens, I put them in a pile and move on to next painting or project. At some point I get back to working and re-working them. Many of these paintings loose their freshness during this process, but I am a firm believer that you can work through the grim periods and come back with a spontaneous and rich painting.

This is the new and improved (above) and an earlier phase (below). During an earlier revision, I had already added the upper right side trees to fill that area of sky, which as a shape was boring even though it was brightly colored. I had also recently added the moon to give the sky more interest. The slope of the hill has not changed that was just bad photography. The upper photo is more true. The big difference between the two is the ground color, lightened to create more contrast and to really establish a horizontal plane (catching more light than a vertical plane). The ditch was dominating the foreground, so I tried to minimize it -- I felt that it was an important element, just not that important. I also added more high lights and shadows to the trees. The house had a little work, but mainly it is the very light blue, instead of white, gray and brown, that helped to marry it to the rest of the painting.

Swamps and Other Wetlands

Green Mansions, oil on canvas 6' x 4'

Green Mansions, Study, Watercolor, 10" x 14"

Yellow Phoenix, Oil on canvas, 6' x 4'

For more than two years, I have been working on a series of paintings based on swamps. These paintings are from photographs that, most often, were taken from the side of the road, but they are not photo-realistic. I rely on my years of painting experience -- from life, memory, imagination and photographs -- to enliven the paint with gestures and space. There are 58 of these paintings, oils and watercolors, displayed at the Portlock Gallery in Chesapeake, VA -- thru August 23, 2010. Yellow Phoenix is an oil painting and is 6' x 4'. This painting took me almost 6 months (working at night and weekends) to finish. The process was pretty simple. It is painted in layers in a fairly standard way, from back to front. I doubt that I will ever paint another with this much detail. Except for some of the broad background, most of this painting was painted with small and smaller brushes.

Green Mansions was much easier to paint. First there was the watercolor study -- it is always easier if you have a map, but sometimes you have to fly by the seat of your pants. Second, I was able to use a little larger brush.