Another batch of paintings

I've been having so much fun working in the garden that I don't get to my computer as frequently as I used to. So here's a batch of paintings done in the last week or two. Some are OK, some are not, but here they are, warts and all. Painting seems to go like that - sometimes you love the results, other times it seems like you spend a lot of time transforming expensive art materials into worthless trash. The life of an artist...

This painting was done on a 10x10cm (4"x 4") piece of gessoed matboard. I like the way the gessoed ground gives texture to the foreground.

Quite different from my usual style, this one, but I like it in many ways. It was fun to do, and the surface is certainly livelier than usual. This seems to be what I'm working through right now - how to make the surface have delicate color transitions but still be lively and visually interesting. This was done almost entirely with a palette knife, using paint scraped off the palette as I was cleaning it. (I hate wasting things - especially those expensive art materials!) This painting is done on a 30x30cm stretched canvas.

This painting needs something to make it more visually interesting. I was intrigued by the tree on the right, and the painting ended up becoming about the tree instead of about color and paint, which is more what I'm interested in. The colors here need some tweaking - although they are more varied in actuality than they look on the screen. Maybe you'll get to see the new improved version someday soon. I think it needs more differences between warm and cool areas; right now the warm areas aren't very warm and the cool areas aren't very warm. But it's a challenge to make warm areas still be light enough to give that delicate spring look, rather than looking like midsummer. I use a lot of white paint. I just ordered three more huge tubes.

20x20cm stretched canvas (8x8 ")

I've reworked this painting several times since I first created it, a week or so before this photo was taken. It will probably receive more reworking - of it's lucky. The colors are a bit different from what shows on the screen, warmer for one thing. If I try to change them, the warmer colors look even less like the actual painting. I keep thinking I should try scanning these small paintings - but of course that would mean waiting until they are good and dry.

15x15cm stretched canvas (6" x 6")

I had decided, before i started this painting, that what I wanted to try including in these paintings was the houses at the end of the fields across the street. Not obviously, but as almost hidden items in the shadows. I got obsessed with the trees and the foreground, and although this painting works in some ways, it will need some retouching. Once I figure out what to do with it. This is larger than a lot of the paitnings I've been doing, 30x30cm (12"x12")

Back to a small format canvas. It's a low energy day - I spent a lot of time in the garden yesterday, struggling with the extremely heavy clay soil here. I sure miss that light, sandy New England soil. Here, whan I mwet the soil enough to be able to rake it (the only way I can do anything at all with it) my boots become huge, heavy footballs of clay within very few steps. Anyway, I am dragging this morning, so I chose to work on a small canvas (10x10cm) that I had prepped with a muted violet ground some days ago - again not wanting to waste those expensive art materials. ;-) As I sat down, I became interested in a very small square of the scene in front of me, just a spot where there are two lines of tall grass separating one field from another, with some trees at the edge of the far field. In reality, there are more trees behind those, and no sky visible, but I decided to add sky, to give a lighter area as a foil for the trees and to keep the top of the painting from being too heavy looking.