Thanksgiving good wishes, a few days early

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! This past week has gone by way too fast. I had hoped to complete a few small paintings. Alas, there was no time to paint, so nothing new to post.

We are leaving early tomorrow morning for a trip to Ireland. Getting organized, and making last minute plans, has taken up lots more time than I expected. The cell phones, computers, and paints will be left at home. While away, I'll be taking lots of photos, for future paintings. Stay tuned for more to come in early Dec.

Best wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving to all!!

The Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe, NM

We just returned from a short trip to Santa Fe, NM, where we attended the annual fundraising gala for the Folk Art Museum. This year, the theme was "Noche de Los Muertos". It was a wonderful event, with great people, food, decorations, music, and best of all, the event raised money to support the children's programs offered by the museum. We had the pleasure of meeting lots of terrific museum supporters, such as these colorful, "Los Muertos". Now, it's time to get back to painting!

Leaving Santa Fe

This was done from a photo, of a mesa, taken from the car window, somewhere between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The desert is unusually green, because it was early spring. I am trying to integrate some of the ideas from my landscape painting class, with my usual way of painting. It's a good start for me. At the same time, I can see that I need to spend more time with this. More to come!

Friday's Class

Friday was the final day of the landscape portion of Carol Tarzier's class. The lesson was about the use of perspective. This painting is, once again, another start on a, yet unfinished, landscape. The concepts of vanishing points were discussed as a means to create perspective. Again, we used the peach ground, with a purple drawing, not too warm, and not too cool. Diane left a comment on an earlier post, asking me to include some of the ideas that were being presented in the class. In response to Diane's request, I'll try to present some of the main concepts that Carol emphasized, at the same time, try to keep it short, and simple. So here goes, the most important concept involved the idea of the basic values used in landscape painting. Usually the lightest value is the sky, the source of light, the next lightest is the ground, which receives the light, followed by the distant slanting plane, usually the mountains. The darkest value would be the foreground verticals, such as trees. This information must be very familiar to experienced landscape painters. To me, learning about the four values was all new information, and it all made perfect sense. If interested, these ideas are presented in more detail in John Carlson's book, Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, which is an assigned text for our class. Learning about landscape painting has been a whole new experience for me. I learned a lot! Thank you, Carol!

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