I had the best afternoon!  I am at our house in the mountains.   The weather is beautiful. At 1 o’clock it was mostly sunny and in the mid 60s. As I sometimes do when I’m here on Friday’s I decided to take the afternoon off to paint.

I had lunch outside on the deck and then decided it was so nice I had to plein aire paint.  I decided to go to the Three Ridges overlook just up the road.  I drove up there, set up, and started painting.  Not too long after I got there a woman showed up and told me that they were about to have a wedding rehearsal there for a wedding tomorrow evening.  I asked if I was in the way and she said she wasn’t sure. I’m sure she was worried about how her clients would react.  We agreed that I’d move my car out of the way but not my easel since it was all set up for the scene I was painting. Obviously if the wedding party objected I would have to move.

The wedding party showed up shortly thereafter.  They were very friendly and seemed delighted that I was there. I think I added to the ambience of the experience. They watched me paint, took pictures of me painting.  The father of the bride took a picture over my shoulder of the bride posing behind my painting.  It was a lot of fun. They had their rehearsal.  Since I was painting outside I was trying to paint fast so I made pretty good progress while they were doing their walk through and taking photos.  They were all very complementary of my work, which was very nice. The father of the bride took my business card. I ask him to share some of the pictures they took.  Hopefully he will.

It clouded up and I was worried it would rain on me. After last weekend I know that’s a bad thing.  I’d also lost my light so I packed up and came home shortly after they left.  I’m going to have to finish it in studio from a photograph.  Here is a picture of the unfinished painting on location. The chairs were added for the rehearsal. They were not there when I started.

The mountains and sky are pretty good. The light had changed from when I started. The sun had come around and the mountains in the foreground were much hazier than earlier in the day.  I still need to do the details in front.  Now I feel I need to make it special since it was part of a special occasion. I will share the finished product.

It’s been a while since I posted anything.  Primarily that’s because I had the good fortune to go to Italy for a week to see my sister and her husband.  As always, Italy is wonderful and so picturesque.  It’s also very hard to paint.  I’ve already become discouraged, but I will keep trying.

There was a half finished painting on the easel when I left and I finished it while I was trying to get over jet lag from my return flight.  I like it so I thought I’d share.

I haven’t done too many waterscapes, and I’ve always been very unsuccessful with pictures of surf.  On this one I had more success.  I painted it from a photo I took along 17 Mile Drive in Carmel California a few years back.  It was a windy rainy April day and the skies were mean.  I enjoyed capturing the different colors in the surf and the sky.  The rocks, as always, were a challenge.  I like the end result well enough.  As is true with most paintings, it looks better in from a distance rather than in a close up photo.

I’ve got many other things to share so I will try to write another post this weekend.

I said I wasn’t going to post these because it’s spring, but spring doesn’t seem to want to come to the Mid-Atlantic states, so I give up. I’m going to post my snow paintings.

I did these in December.  They are my first attempts at snow scenes.  This really challenges my ability to see the right colors, as I discussed in an earlier post.  I mean snow is white, right?  As it turns out, it’s not really white.  At least it’s not all white.

We were on the mountain for Thanksgiving in 2014 and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving we got an early snowstorm.  It didn’t snow below about 1,500 feet, but at 3,400 feet we got about 10 inches.  It was a wet, heavy snow that stuck to the tree limbs.  It was beautiful.  I went out for a walk with my camera on Thanksgiving morning and took some pictures as the sun began to come out but before the snow started to fall from the tree limbs.  Our house is on a golf course, so it was easy to walk to some really pretty scenery that showed off Mother Nature’s work really well.

I did two small paintings from the photos I took.  One is of the pond at the base of the 7th fairway.  This was a beautiful scene but I struggled with the painting.  I like the trees and the snow, but I did not do the reflection on the surface of the pond justice.  To me it looks out of perspective, and of course the colors aren’t right.

The second painting is of a photo taken further up where a stream crosses the 7th Fairway.  This one I like better.  I stood and waited for a long time for the sun to come out so I could get the contrasting shadows of the trees and the brilliant snow where it was not shadowed.  I like this one better.

Now I promise, no more winter pictures for a while.

Many of the impressionists reportedly painted fast.  Of course in the age before decent photography, they often painted sketches of their subjects quickly before the light and other aspects of the scenes changed, and then they would repaint them in the studio.  Of course, these “sketches” are magnificent paintings in their own right.

I wouldn’t call myself a slow painter. I’ve never been a really patient person.  One of the reasons I started painting in the first place we to try to improve my patience. That said, I wouldn’t call myself a fast painter either.  Most of my paintings are done in multiple sessions each of several hours. This is especially true when I paint at our mountain house, because I’m there for a weekend and then gone for two weeks.  This is good, because I can put down some parts of a painting and then it will be pretty dry when I return to work on it some more.  However, it also spoils me because I can paint in layers, which is not a good option when you don’t have two-week breaks.

The other reason to learn to paint faster is that I will never be a good plein aire painter if I don’t learn to paint an entire scene in one setting. So to that end, when in Falls Church I’m going to try to paint entire (small) works in one session. The painting below was painted in about two hours from a photo I took several years ago on the North Carolina shore. (My friend Rodney tells me I need to do more waterscapes.) I confess that I had done a pencil sketch on the board earlier. I actually like this painting it a lot.  It’s best viewed at a distance, so the photograph may not do it justice.

In case you haven’t noticed, Three Ridges is a favorite subject of mine.  It looms next to Wintergreen, which is actually atop a peak called Devil’s Knob.  If I go just up the street from our house to the Devil’s Knob Overlook, which is close to the highest point in Wintergreen, I have a fabulous and ever changing view of Three Ridges.  It makes a wonderful subject because it’s familiar and comfortable but different in every photograph I take of it, and I take a lot.

I just finished a painting inspired by a photograph I stopped and took one morning in mid-January when I arrived.  The clouds were lying heavy in the valleys and the peaks were above them.  There was another layer of cloud above and a strip of colorful sky from the morning sun, which had been up for a while but was fighting the clouds.  Below is the painting, followed by the photograph that inspired it. The painting is 36×18 oil on canvas.

I’m sure you haven’t seen the last of Three Ridges.  I have many more inspirational photographs.  I’ve painted in in the Spring, Fall and Winter. I’m still searching for the perfect Summer view. Maybe when the weather breaks I’ll try my hand at a plein aire.