Today I travel up to Waynesville, NC to paint my first plein air painting of the year. It feels really good to get out of the studio! Here is the photo I took of the scene and the finished painting. ENJOY!

Last week I wrapped up another still life workshop in my studio. The workshop went very smoothly and I have to give it to my students they were a hard working group. Here are some images from the workshop.

Claude Monet was a master at the revisited scene (or Motif). He would do the exact same scene over and over with two exceptions, the lighting and the composition would be different. For example his haystack or Rouen Cathedral series.

Western North Carolina was pounded with yet another heavy snow storm this past week. I took advantage of this situation as my neighbors were snowed in to afraid to venture out. Just up the road from the house I pass this little farm almost everyday. For the longest time I wanted to paint it. I knew that with a fresh blanket of snow the scene would be really ideal.

Last week I completed what is the biggest painting I've ever attempted. At this point I'm not sure how I'm going to transport this thing. The painting "Black Balsam Ascent" is a whopping 48" x 60" (unframed). 

I was recently skimming through some reference photos I took while visiting Ocracoke Island, NC back in July.  I came across this image (below) and thought, I can do something with this.
 

More often then not in my preparation of a painting (especially plein air) I won't even do a preliminary sketch. Well in 2010 that's going to change. Back in college a teacher once told me never go with your first idea. I guess I always had that saying in the back of my brain somewhere. I just chose to ignore it for some reason. Well, in this particular project I decided to be an artist and not just a painter. A painter in my opinion is someone that copies what's in front of them. They don't take into consideration the possibilities of a particular scene. An artist on the other hand makes the scene his or her own. After studying this scene for a little bit I decided to quickly manipulate it in Photoshop. This image (below) is what came of that playing around.



Still not satisfied with the composition I decided to do some small thumbnail sketches. As you can see below in Sketch 1 it has similarities to the manipulated image. As I thought about the scene some more in Sketch 2 I wanted the shack to take a more centralized and dominate role in my painting. In Sketch 3 I played with the proportions of the shack as compared to the boat behind it and refined some more.

SKETCH 1

SKETCH 2

SKETCH 3

Satisfied with this final sketch I created this 18 x 24 painting in the studio (below)

"Silver Lake Afternoon"

I find that my studio work sometimes has a more dramatic composition. The reason for this is when i'm in the field painting en plein aire that I often get caught up in the literal aspects of a scene.

When I compose in the studio from a photo reference I often find find myself making better decisions about composition or the visual flow of a painting.

In this particular studio painting I wanted to show my process from start to finish. I painted this plein air study (below) back in August. 

This is a painting that I completed back in 2008. I had it posted on my 

I just got back from Paint Wilmington 2009. 

As part of the Oil Painters of America 5th Annual Great Paint-Out I host a day of fun for some of it's members. We had a great turn out of about 15 to 20 artists. The event was held on the beautiful campus of Warren Wilson College just east of Asheville. The weather couldn't have been better. Thanks for all who participated!