Running Before Time Took Our Dreams Away

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Running Before Time Took Our Dreams Away
acrylic on canvas
24" x 36"
$1175 framed
Available for purchase through Freshwater Studio & Gallery, Dillon, MT (contact)

I was listening to Pink Floyd's album "The Division Bell" while painting this one. The painting's title comes from a line in that album's last track, "High Hopes" - it really stuck out to me as I was working on the buffalo.

The photo has some light reflection on the left side, which helps to reveal the texture a bit in the photo. I've been working on practicing patience lately with my art, and I feel like that's permitting me to produce richer colors on the canvas (that effect isn't translated as well when photographed). The immediate gratification of using palette knives to mix colors on the canvas is wonderful, but I wanted to achieve more depth without using more texture. Texture is still an integral part of a painting like this, but I've been layering textured paint with light color washes to make the effect more subtle. I've also been scraping with the knives more; once several layers of texture and color have dried, I literally scrape more color onto the canvas to achieve softer highlights and to make the paint break in a natural-looking way. The layers of colors interact with each other to produce a bit of a glow.

Where vast and far the rustling grass burns with its russet stain,
O'er prairies lone, beyond the throne, of Rocky Mountain chain,
The lowing herds, the league-long herds, of bisons roam the wild,
By streams serene, by meadows green, and where great cliffs are pil'd
-Isaac McLellan, from "The Flight of the Buffalo"

Summer Relief

Summer Relief
acrylic on canvas
24" x 12"
$625 framed
Available for purchase through Freshwater Studio & Gallery, Dillon, MT (contact)


Sketching this moose prior to painting him was my first foray into the world of moose-drawing. They're beautiful creatures - I love those big goofy grins and huge noses. I remember being in the Grand Tetons once with my parents when I was young...we were hiking and spotted a moose calf no more than 20 feet away from us, just off the trail. Its mother was close by, eyeing us suspiciously and ready to trample us if need be. It was really quite an impressive encounter, and I gained a lot of healthy respect for those big animals. And here's my little nod to them: a bull moose getting some relief from the summer heat.

I used my new iridescent pearl paint for this one. It's particularly noticeable when the light hits it from different angles.


"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it alright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."
-Henry David Thoreau

Still Standing

Still Standing

acrylic on gallery wrapped canvas

18" x 24"

$530 + $28 shipping (contact)

I'm trying out some different things with texture in an effort to loosen up a bit. For some reason, it's easier for me to be more abstract when I'm painting animals...I find it harder to apply that ability to landscapes. I still have a lot of experimenting and learning to do, and it's way too much fun. :)

I bought some Golden iridescent pearl paint yesterday and am going to start experimenting with that, as well as Golden's crackle paste, which I'm very excited to try out.

Uphill

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Uphill

acrylic on canvas
24" x 12"
$625 framed
Available for purchase through Freshwater Studio & Gallery, Dillon, MT (contact)

The mighty American bison is truly a remarkable creature - it's so solid and powerful. What I love in particular about them, though, is how they're both majestic and goofy - they always have that ridiculous patchy fur in warm weather and they like to roll around in the mud as much as a dog does.

The background for this painting consists of several layers with both palette knife and brush work. I wanted it to have a sort of cave-ish appearance, and the acrylic gels work really well when trying to achieve a rocky, organic look. The buffalo himself is painted in shades of red and yellow, and his horns & hooves have a blue-ish tint to them.

"The road uphill and the road downhill are one and the same."
-Heraclitus of Ephesus

In the Dandelion Field

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In the Dandelion Field 

acrylic on canvas 12" x 24" 

Available for purchase at Carnation Corners, Carnation, WA

We saw this beautiful white horse outside of Wisdom, Montana. I was nervous about painting her, since I didn't want her painting to end up looking like 1980s-era white unicorn poster...but she was too pretty not to put on canvas! The yellow accents have some iridescent gold paint mixed in to give them a subtle shimmer (yep, still using that gold paint...I love the color tint it produces even more than the shimmery effect).

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to take more liberties with my painting. Although I used a lot of texture on the first main background layer for this piece, I didn't use nearly as much paint as I usually do for the remaining layers. The rest of the background was created by literally scraping paint onto the surface with palette knives. I rotated this knife method with doing color washes with a brush, and I think this created a lot more depth to the color than otherwise. The horse itself is a bit translucent in places - I wanted her to blend in a bit with the background. To give her a similar depth, I painted her using multiple layers of thin washes in varying shades of blue, yellow, green, and white (some palette knife scraping was involved as well).

Now my brothers call from the bay, 
Now the great winds shoreword blow, 
Now the salt tides seaward flow; 
Now the wild white horses play, 
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. 
-Matthew Arnold, The Foresaken Merman

mimesis

My computer is in the repair shop right now, so I'm reduced to David's laptop and am feeling rather lost without all my files and photos at my fingertips. I have new paintings to share and will hopefully be able to post them soon, should my computer survive its ordeal (it's almost a decade old, which is pretty ancient in technological years). Devoid of any photos of my new paintings, I'm offering up one of our wedding photos - it's the quintessential Montana landscape, and we all know how I just can't get that landscape out of my head.

I'm really excited to be taking my art in new directions. I'm trying to push myself and focus more on the process of painting rather than the object - it's easy to lose track of the heart of a painting when you have your nose two inches from a photograph. I'm trying to use photos more as jumping-off points than anything else, and that's a struggle for someone as nit-picky as myself. I often think of Aristotle's Poetics in my attempts at creating art (sometimes I even think of Plato, despite how irritating I find him). A footnote explaining Aristotle's use of the Greek term "mimesis" in the Perseus Project's translation of the Poetics sums things up pretty darn well, I think: "Life 'presents' to the artist the phenomena of sense, which the artist 're-presents' in his own medium, giving coherence, designing a pattern."

Therein lies the challenge.