I finally found myself a painterly approach

For years I've been trying to loosen up my painting style and stop being locked into a purely realistic approach, and this painting feels to me like my first truly conscious achievement of a naturalistic painting that used brushstrokes as a fundamental element of the design. Participating in the Van Gogh immersive show last year was perhaps the final impetus to making that happen. Having the oil paints with their workability definitely helped.

I used mostly two brushes, a 1/8" flat and a 1/4" bristle bright, and adding a small 1/16" synthetic round for the foreground flowers and grass. Normally I would have switched to the small round to try to get the distant trees to look more like trees, but I've finally accepted that that's not what makes a painting good. What makes a painting look good to me is a good composition, an interesting or pleasing color combination, and some opportunity of mental or emotional connection.

I'm finding that I really enjoy painting the magnificent landscapes of the gorge and I want to paint as many of these beautiful places as I can. Coyote Wall is part of the Washington Syncline, a U-shaped fold with the youngest layers of rock on the inside. The other half of this U is on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. I'm not sure how the wall formed but it looks like a slump/slide to me. It's another famous climbing site, one of several in the Gorge. I took the reference photos in April of 2019, the year of the Balsamroot Superbloom.

It was a bit of a revelation to me when I first brushed in the trees, to find that they looked just like trees to me, and I remembered what I've heard many times from artists I admire that engaging the viewers' own imagination helps them connect with a painting. A realistic or naturalistic painting is an illusion that invokes a response from the viewer, and imagination is what makes that possible. So there's no reason to feel like you have to paint detail, unless you want to.

Flowering Fruit Trees

Driveway and Cherry Tree

We get this wonderful side benefit of fruit trees—besides the delicious fruit in the summer and fall, we get the flowers in late April and early May. And this pie cherry tree on a friend's driveway was shining with flowers on this overcast late April day. I was over there on a drizzly day and tried taking a photo through my car window, but raindrops got in the way. I was back a few days later when it wasn't raining and got my photo before the flowers faded.

I finally have time to paint again—my glass work is done for a while. I have a backlog of work I want to do from last fall till just lately, so I'll be working a lot this year. And as I look out at my garden, which looks much more grown than last year, I'm eager to get out there and do more plein air painting!

It's going to be a busy year!

Hellebore Heaven—at last!

I love hellebores! I'm so hungry for flowers this time of year, and here they show up with their great colors and keep blooming till the next garden players are ready to take over the performance. When a late afternoon sunbeam backlit this young, dark red beauty, I grabbed my camera and ran outside to get a picture. In the shade it looks like dark mahogany, but when the sun hit it, it really looked this red. Ahhhhh.

Both the red and this pink are unnamed seedlings. I think it will be many years before I have enough hellebores. Tough, evergreen, drought tolerant, need only a little bit of sun, love bare clay devoid of humus, bloom for weeks and weeks—and some make babies for you!

Sunshine, snow, mudbugs—and Spring!

What a treat, to wake up to a snow blanket over everything, and yet know that Spring is coming soon! Not until the hydrangea buds have to make it through another two nights of brrrrrr temperatures, and some additional number of nights around freezing, but it's coming!

I know it by the hellebores who refuse to be cowed...

I know it by the sunshine lighting up the colored glass...

I see it in the glowing clouds shining through the trees...

and even in the skeletons of gardens past...

it's in the sky, the clouds, the trees, in the small things you only see under your feet, alive and growing. It's in the sun returning, in the birds going after mudbugs. It's almost here!