Montana del Oro

We often drive up the California coast just to spend a few days admiring the beautiful scenery. In June, while staying in Cambria, I joined a workshop that was painting at Montana del Oro, a State Park near Morro Bay. I did this painting of the surf crashing on the rocks below the cliffs.

Lighting the North

This painting was inspired by a John E Marriott photograph entitled Northern Lights.Aurora Borealis

Sierra Nevada Snow Field

This is the painting I selected for this year's Chistmas card. I try to find something that reminds me of the cold, snowy Christmas season where I grew up in Canada. This scene is from a backpacking trip in the Sierras in which we encountered a lot of snow. One of our group almost landed in the lake after slipping from a traverse of a similar field on this side of the lake. Now that would have been cold!

Canadian West Coast

This painting in near-monotone colors was inspired by our many trips to the British Columbia Coast and in particular, the area around Tofino. The weather is often cloudy which casts a grey look to the ocean scene. In this rendition, I have stylized the trees to capture the wind-swept look they often have.

This painting is my candidate for our Chrismas card this year.
It was inspired by a photo by John Marriott in his recently published book
Banff and Lake Louise. The title of the painting is
"Mt. Rundle, Canadian Rockies".

Milestone Basin, Sierra Nevada Mountains

This painting is another in my Sierra series. All of the scenes are from photos I took while backpacking a few years ago. While I am probably past my backpacking days, the beatuful scenes of the Sierras are vividly imprinted in my mind and with a bit of luck, I will paint them as I remember them.

Sedona Hills

Every year we spend a week in Sedona and I am always taken by the beauty of the red rock formations. This year, I attempted to capture the vivid colors after a brief winter storm. The result is highly abstacted both in form and color. 

Bridge Over Colored Waters

My goal in this painting was to exaggerate the colors and to depict the trees in a more abstract way than I usually do. The scene is a melding of a bridge and creek we saw on a trip to New England and the California hills in the background. 

Woods Lake, Sierra Nevada Mountains

This painting is another in a series of scenes from my backpacking trips over the years. My goal is to be able to paint the Sierras like Dale Laitinen who is a master at capturing the remote beauty of these mountains. The depiction of the lake is from a photograph I took but the background mountains are from my imagination and are perhaps a bit too stylized. The painting is done on a full sheet.

Aftermath

This experimental painting is semi-abstract with only the tree shapes and colors suggesting the reminants of a forest fire. It was done in two steps. First, the underpainting of wet into wet was let dry. Then, The blue foreground was added as were the drips depicting burnt trees. A couple drops of red acrylic ink suggested continuing hot spots.