Finishing up before the new year begins!

So it’s been a few weeks since my studio flooded for the second time in as many weeks and I’m finally getting back to painting. I’ve actually been at it for most of the week, but I’ve been doing a little experimenting and so it’s taking a bit more time.

One of the experiments has been my approach to painting all together. I’ve made a little more space for myself so that I can have four or five paintings in progress at one time. It might sound like a lot, but considering some of my experimentation is taking longer than average times for layers to dry, it’s been exactly what I’ve needed. While I finished up these two, I still have four additional paintings in various stages at this point.

I also have the studio / basement better set up with easels on cinder blocks and wire racks to keep things above flood waters should they come. I move my office space permanently upstairs so I also created some space downstairs to hang some of my more inspirational piece. It’s been a little tough since the basement is flagstone and no real place to hang paintings. I’m using a technique with chains hanging from the ceiling similar to what I’m hoping to do with my outdoor art booth that I hope to introduce as soon as we get decent enough weather for me to set it up and take some photos (the rain here our first year in Connecticut has been consistent and annoying!)

Painting mountains is always a bit relaxing for me as it reminds me of the great vacations we used to take up in the Rockies near Taos, NM. In this painting in particular I was experimenting with the cloud layer interacting with the mountains themselves as well as providing a lot more texture. In particular, the top of the clouds are a lot thicker and within the tree line there is a lot more texture than I typically do – hard to see either in the picture though.

This one I was also experimenting with texture. The main background was textured using a plastic bag. The trees and the bird were all done using paint from a bottle similar to pouring techniques, so it’s all raised up a bit. This one might still take another two or three days to fully dry (it’s already been drying for two.)

The painting itself is based on a photo I took earlier this spring. The bird is a turkey vulture that liked to perch up high on one of the dead trees in our front yard. I even found a couple of it’s feathers in the yard over the few weeks he hung around. Sadly we had to take down the tree he was perched on along with a few others that were all dead due to an infestation from before we bought the property. I say sadly because I love trees and these were each at least 100 to 150 feet tall and were spectacular even if they were dead (it would have taken two people to wrap their arms around the base of most of those trees.)

Based on the storms over the last month or so I can say removing the trees was a good call. We have a rather heavily wooded piece of property and during one particular storm I heard at least two trees come down around us off in the forest and we had a number of rather large branches come crashing down as well.

That storm took out power for us for a good 36 hours or so and left most of Connecticut around us scrambling to clear roads and fix power lines. I really felt for the line workers and tree folks having to be out in the days that followed working the cleanup – people from all over the country were here and it felt like every third vehicle on the road was a bucket truck headed to the next site (thankfully I didn’t have to get out much during that time!)