View from my Window, Feb 21

A cloudy day. This painting will need some touching up once it's dry enough for me to be able to add some little details to further define the house and buildings. Thick paint again. I'm not yet used to - or enjoying - using thick paint. But I'll persist for a while. Maybe once my hands get the hang of it and let me get past these prosaic representations, I'll be able to play around with the paint and once more make the paintings about paint rather than about the view itself.

View from my window, Feb 18

Again, the view from our little sun terrace, but in quite a different style than yesterday's. I'm experimenting with using thicker paint, so consider the next few paintings experimental (It's the kindest thing I can say about them!) This one was painted on a mostly sunny day. The painting experience was like something out of slapstick comedy. I had realized yesterday that the cup I was using for water (I'm using water-mixable oils) was not working. It was one of those collapsible plastic cups that have the benefit of not taking up very much room in your painting kit. They also have the odd quirk of sometimes collapsing while you are using them, spilling water all over. So, scratch those off the plein air kit list. Do today I used a ceramic cup, which lasted until I accidentally hit it and smashed it on the floor - luckily I waited only about two minutes before having this klutzy attack, so there was not yet any paint on the water that spread all over the floor tiles. And when I dropped a fully loaded brush about two minutes later I was able to wipe up the paint before it dried. I think being in painting mode puts me into klutz mode as well. Is that a good excuse???

The View from my Window

OK, back to plein air painting! Well, to be precise, I was not out painting 'en plein air' but instead was sitting on our little sun terrace, painting the view across the street. I love this view, and it was one of the reasone this house appealed to me so much. (For the story of how we came to buy a new house, see this other blog.) What I'm interested in exploring, though, is not necessarily the details of the view itself. The subject of my paintings seems to be paint - how the paint looks on canvas, how colors look next to each other, blended with each other, interwoven with each other. this painting was done almost exclusively in two colors, yellow ochre and untramarine blue, with just a tiny bit of burnt siena added to the mix here and there. All with large amounts of white of course. I've been using oils, which are not my usual medium. Although I have used oils in the past, for the last 10 years or so, I've almost always used acrylics, and worked mostly in my studio on more abstract paintings. Because they dry so quickly, however, acrylics aren't very adaptable to painting anywhere but in the studio. So I've decided, in the interest of painting on site, to get reacquainted with the lushness of oil paints. This blog will be a record not just of the paintings themselves, but of my experiences as I re-discover the possibilities and frustrations of oils as a medium.

In this painting, I started with very thin washes and loved the look at first. But once I started to add more painting, things got out of hand and I had to pretty much scrape everything away and start again. My favorite paint effect in this painting is the scumbled paint at the horizon on the left hand side. I like that look of one color covering another, letting just glimpses of the underlaying color show through.

Stream behind the lake at Puivert

If you leave the lake at Puivert by the road that runs past the lakeside restaurant, you will come to a small ford across this stream, on a flat concrete bridge that's underwater much of the time. This day, back in April of last year, the concrete platform was high and dry and my friend Joan and I set up to paint there. It was a challenge - the coolness over the stream generated a strong wind, and our canvases were frequently in danger of blowing into the stream.

View across the Fields, Serre

If you take the D613 east out of Couiza, you will drive through a wonderland of places to paint. Serres is one of the small towns on this road. It's a particularly good spot for painting because there is a small, shady roadside rest area, complete with picnic tables, that offers this view across the road and fields, There are other painting subjects here as well - a small stream with lovely shadows from the trees in the rest area. A great place for a picnic as well as for painting. A freind and I stopped here one summer day and spent a pleasant hour or two sketching and painting. I was intrigued with the color of the fields of wheat in the foreground, and the soft deep greens of the trees and hedges in the farther field.

The Road to Rivel

This painting was done one April afternoon, on the corner of the road that heads from Ste. Colombe and Chalabre towards the small village of Rivel. The cherry trees had just come into bloom that week. The platane trees, though, are still in the leafless phase, looking very much like twisted torsos.

The Tower at Miraval

Across the street from our house in Ste. Colombe sur l'Hers is a large field, looking across the valley of the Hers river, to the hills on the other side of the valley. On one of those hills lies the town of Miraval, with a white water tower that catches the light beautifully just after sunrise. This painting was done from that field early one summer morning.