Waterfowl Festival this November 9-11

I will be exhibiting some of my latest work at the Waterfowl Festival in Easton, Maryland this November 9-11. If you are a lover of wildlife and landscape art, or an outdoor enthusiast, then the Waterfowl Festival is the place for you. Some of the top wildlife and landscape artists will be exhibiting their work there. Please mark your calendars for this great event. http://www.waterfowlfestival.org/

Evening Sheep, oil on linen panel, 11"x14"

During a plein air event in Vermont, I saw this barn and had to paint it. It was not yet sunset but the mountain behind me had long since blocked the sun from this scene. Given this limitation, I decided to leave out any livestock and focus in getting the barn and the hills in. I was fairly happy with the painting and decided to exhibit it during the competition. While it received good reviews I felt it still needed something else to make it an even better painting.

I brought the painting home and showed it to my wife Becky and expressed my thoughts. She looked at it, and after some contemplation said it needed some sheep. I then remembered how I had thought of putting sheep in but let go of the idea due to the rapidly diminishing light. Within a few minutes I had carefully blocked in the sheep and was very pleased with the results. My beautiful wife has saved more than a few paintings over the years.

Like most of my paintings, this one was painted with a limited palette of Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Red, Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White, applied to Belgium Linen mounted on a laminated birch wood panel, materials of the highest museum-grade archival quality. The bulk of the painting was completed en plein air in about an hour and a half. Minor adjustments, as well as the sheep were added later in the studio. The hills of Vermont are filled with beauty and a feeling of simpler times long past, as this painting forever captures.

Evening Sheep
Oil on linen panel, 11"x14"
$890.00. Contact Bucks County Gallery of Fine Art to inquire 215-862-5272.

The Addition, oil on linen panel, 11"x14"

This is a plein air painting I did up in Vermont. I was driving toward a wetland area that I had spotted the previous day when I saw this barn in the distance. At first I snapped some photos with my telephoto lens with the intention of quickly moving on, but then decided to try to get closer. This can be a challenge since many times a barn like this may be deep inside the private property of owners who may not be home. But I lucked out on this one, the barn was right off a side road, so I set up to paint.

It was a mostly cloudy day which worked nice for this type of scene. You see, the barn faced north, and on a sunny day the face of the barn would have been silhouetted from the southern sun, and the painting would not have worked. I took about two hours to paint this, with some slight modifications made later. I used my typical palette of just four pigments, Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Red, Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White to complete this painting.

I called this painting "The Addition" because of the interesting white siding on the lower right. I'm not sure if this was just a siding job or if they added on a another section to an already existing structure. Either way, I love old barns like this. They are a testament to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, the family farm, the small, independent family business. I'm glad that some people still hold on to this spirit, as this beautiful plein air painting shows.

The Addition
Oil on linen panel, 11"x14"
$890