"Spring Garden" (oil on linen; 11" x 14") sold

sold

Reference photo

As I said yesterday, I am done with winter paintings.  Winter is over where I live and in my heart.  Time to move on to the spring stuff!  We plein-air painters are seasonal creatures, sensitive to the changes in temperature, the angle of the sun, and the life cycle of plants.  It's hard to paint snow inside when daffodils and hyacinths are blooming outside.  Even if we paint in our studios on a rainy day, our mind and heart yearn for the outdoors.

It was a soggy day yesterday; I got drenched top to bottom doing yard work.  The Southeast was pummeled by the destructive tornadoes.  I, however, painted "Spring Garden" from a photo I took last year on a most beautiful spring day.  The subject is a white garden gate at River Farm in Alexandria, VA. 

The gate glows in the sun.  Irises, daisies, peonies, and some other white flowers are blooming.  The power of art is such that it will be always spring in "Spring Garden."  Flowers will never die.  The sun will never go down.  I love art.

"Rose Arbor" (oil on linen, 12" x 16") sold

sold

Reference photo

No, I didn't paint the picture outside.  In this heat?  No way!  A friend of mine who painted with me at Green Spring Gardens Park on Tuesday ended up in a hospital emergency room.  Please drink plenty of water and stay cool.

I took the reference photo at River Farm in Alexandria, VA exactly a month ago, and started the painting soon after.  But lots of things happened since; it got put aside.  Once the excitement is gone, it's hard to get back to that place.  Since leaving something unfinished goes against my "I am not a quitter" philosophy, however, I managed to complete "Peach Roses." 

As we are getting into the green-green-everywhere-green season, a landscape painter's task is to learn to mix many shades of greens--warm, cool, intense, grayed, dark, pale, etc.  I pushed back the distant pergola and the rest of  the right side of the painting by using lots of grayed violets.  For that reason, the painting is much easier to read than the photo, which tends to flatten space.  Now I am done with the darned thing, I can paint something else.  Yeah!