Fall is over in Colorado's high country

Started as a plein air piece, but finished in studio and given to friends of mine.  This was a glorious autumn and I went to Cataract Lake, where this was painted three times in one week!  The first time I hiked there, and I swore I would come back to paint.  I did, twice.  I just finished a large painting from a photo I took while there.  I will post it in a day or so.

My favorite of the summer plein air paintings

Winter has arrived in my part of Colorado, and it is nice to have a little fall color hanging on the wall! We are supposed to get 4 to 10" of snow tonight. I know that is a large amount for many of you, but I live in ski country and we like it. Some of the ski areas are already open and others open later this week. Copper Mountain and Keystone both open on November 4th, although terrain will be limited to where they have snowmaking for a while. We need a lot more snow before there will be enough to ski on without any man made snow added to it. It will come; we don't have to worry about that!

More autumn scenery coming up with a new show

Jenn Cram, an excellent clay artist, and I have a show opening this weekend at the Breckenridge Theater Gallery. Titled "Transitions", the show will hang for a month or so. The show title works well with my pieces as so many of them are obviously in different seasons. I have a lot of landscapes with wildflowers in summer, snow in winter, melting snow in spring, and of course, my favorite season to paint with lots of color, autumn.

This scene is a beaver pond that I saw as I was driving home one day at the peak time for fall color. I called it "Reflecting". One day I will figure out a way to think of interesting titles! My nephew, Shane Rebenscheid, calls his paintings names like "The day that Sam lost his watch" and "Covert Diplomacy". Once you see the painting, it makes sense, (mostly) but how he comes up with the titles, I will never know!

The link above takes you to his blog. Shane is a commercial illustrator, doing book covers for the most part, and now he has taken up "fine art" and is doing well. He has a great art education and it is good to see him using all of it! If you want to see his illustration work, go to blot.com (another great title!)

Autumn will be here soon

When you live at 9300 feet, the seasons are short, except for winter! Our aspen trees will look like this in about 6 to 8 weeks. By mid-October we won't have leaves left on the trees and ski season will start at the end of October.

I finished this painting this morning, and it is the first one I have done in a month or so. It has been a very busy summer!

Continuing the fall theme

A quick little 6x8 painting I did as an experiment in being loose. I call it "Windblown". It took me about 45 minutes to paint and then a couple of days to look at it and see if I liked it or not. Then I spent another half hour tweaking it :)
The hardest thing for me to do is to make a confident, yet casual, brush stroke. I see confidence and edges as the two main things that separate amateur from professional. Laying that brush stroke down and knowing it is in the right place, with the right value and color, is hard for me. I tend to put it there, and then change it. Not confident at all! But I am gradually getting there.
Now I look at this photo, I see one or two things I need to change, but heck, maybe I will just leave it alone.....

Gallery wrap or frames?

Another Colorado fall color painting. It actually is very similar to the one I used with my last post. Just a different view of the same river, from photos taken the same day. My other painting is only a 9x12, and I liked it well enough, I decided to do this one larger, so it is 20x24 and painted on cradle board. Cradle board is similar to a gallery wrap except that it is a masonite panel with 1 1/2" edges versus canvas wrapped around the stretcher bars. This time I continued the image around the edges for the first time. On other cradle boards I have used, I just painted the edges a solid color.

What sells best? A framed piece or gallery wrap? Do you charge differently for one like this versus one in a frame that cost $100-200? I don't know the answer to that, as I have just started doing larger pieces in the last few months. In this economy, I find that smaller pieces sell better, so I have not done a lot of large paintings. However, I will be doing some outdoor shows this summer and will need some larger pieces to have impact as people walk by the booth. Hopefully I will be able to tell you what sells best by the end of the summer!