Category: Art

  • Landscape sketches

    Landscape sketches

    Took a little dip into painting again today. The quarantine energy has been the opposite of what motivates me to paint, but today as i was setting up a painting station for my daughter, i decided to flip open the big pad and do some quick, monochromatic paintings.

  • Dorian’s

    Dorian’s

    I made this blind contour drawing while waiting for Jeff Parker to play at Dorian’s. It was my last night out, and the last live music I witnessed before the stay at home orders hit Chicago just a few days later. The show was exquisite. I can’t wait to get out and see live jazz…

  • More painting experiments

    More painting experiments

    I’ve had the Sayre Park painting hanging in the living room to observe for the past few weeks. It’s been a great reminder of the kind of work i don’t want to do.

  • Loch Lake: session 2

    Loch Lake: session 2

    Covered a lot of ground and had a really fun painting session last night. I blocked in more of the hills and mountains in the distance, and put in a couple of washes on the lake itself. I expect the final painting to not look much like this at all, but it’s heading in the…

  • A big scale-up

    A big scale-up

    Put in time last night doing an underdrawing and putting some paint down on this 48×36″ panel. Lately i’ve been trying to just work on whatever i’m drawn to in the moment, and last night I was feeling this big one. I lost a little momentum looking for the right source photo. to work from.…

  • Gestural landscape practice

    Gestural landscape practice

    Working on freeing myself up a bit more, so I’m going to be making some low-risk, low-stakes landscapes on paper. This scene is inspired by a photograph I took on my hike to Chasm Lake, just after climbing above the treeline.

  • Above Sky Pond

    Above Sky Pond

    I am very pleased with how this painting turned out. There was a very real risk of overworking it and I managed to avoid that. I am still thinking about what i’ve learned with this painting, and I’ll probably have to consolidate those thoughts into another post.

  • Wild Basin

    Wild Basin

    The scene is somewhere along the trail to Ouzel Falls from the Wild Basin trailhead in Estes Park. If memory serves, this spot is not far above Copeland Falls.

  • A very good painting session

    A very good painting session

    Everything about this roughly two hour painting session felt good. It had its ups and downs but more often than not I was experiencing a flow state. I succeeded in not overworking anything, and I now have a clear vision of where this painting will end. I am toying with a tone change in the…