Here's the frozen underpainting, even the brush froze after a few splashes and behaved more like a twiggy weed than bristles. After 30 minutes wandering around to photograph and drink coffee while waiting for the underpainting to thaw, I broke down the easel and walked over to where my painting buddy for the day was located. They weren't painting with ice cubes and were working in water colors. So it's all about location, location, location.

"Painting With Ice Cubes"

The usual gouache underpainting was not a good approach on this day and after the sun came up the temps dropped further. The top of the pond had ice and even the dribbles from my rinse container froze instantly.

Go to the Driftless6/10.blogspot site where I posted about some nice wool, fingerless mits a friend made for me. Tomorrow promises to be a good morning for painting with them and I'll photograph them.

She made them from felted old sweaters.

Tomorrow I paint a new site in town. It's near one I was working on last weekend. Both were passed along to me by a new painting bud, Doug D who I'll be joining tomorrow morning.

Last weekend, those funny spectators were out. The park has a well established frisbee golf course and regular players even at 8 in the morning. So I positioned myself in the middle of a lovely field and painted dead pines against the light.

After an hour and a half, a woman came trudging with her dog across the field, shouting "what are you doing?" I thought she was calling to the dog who could have used some management. But her discipline the dog voice was directed at me:

"What are you doing?"

"Painting."

"It's so ugly now, you should have been here in Oct...those trees over there were yellow ..."

And so it went for a while. She had posed herself in front of my view and the dog was yelping and lunging at me. I asked if she wanted to look at the painting.

"Oh, you added color that isn't there. Those trees are ugly."

And so on for a little while more until I asked if she'd like my card.

"Yes, then I can call you and tell you when it's pretty out."

Funny.

Photos tomorrow.

"Green Begins in March" is a working title for this late winter painting done last year. 6x6 inches, pastel and gouache on sandpaper.

As usual, it is en plein air pastel on sandpaper and the location was a farm copse with a pond during the winter and spring. What was interesting was the bits of green, of course, which after a winter can seem dramatically strong. Also, the tremendous blue band of shadow which because the overall terrain was pale, dead grass, took up the reflection of sky deeply. A hazard here became apparent as I watchrd the foreground tree shadow sweep quickly to the right and change the composition to uninteresting ... another reason to be decisive at the beginning and design immediately.

During this season of painting, I was also chasing the blanched quality of light which also indicates winter and some other conditions. The damp, light absorptive tree trunks made a dramatic and graphic contrast with line-based statements.

The gouache underpainting can be tough in winter weather, however, it pays off as a design tool for me beyond what a thumbnail can do. Thumbnails are great exercises and can produce good paintings, but my own do not excite me with the moment and the energy like an underpainting can. The potential handicap can be that I fall in love with the underpainting and am hesitant to obliterate it. Risk all to gain.

Here is another from that season:

"Forebearer to Spring" is likely to be another working title. 9x12 inches, pastel and gouache on sandpaper.

Working titles are a way to tie together the image and a word or two or three. Sometimes the title process can be the most difficult part of it all, or perhaps the organizing of that process is not yet well enough developed in my work flow. "Dead Pine with Friends" was a working title that was not going to do anything useful in the wide world, but still recalls the painting more thoroughly.

These two paintings remain labeled with working titles, at least until I sit down to do formal ones.

"Beyond the River's Edge" Plein air, 11x14 inches, salmon running through the river, big ones – thirty pounders, and fishing bodies drifting along trying to seduce the monsters onto a hook...

This is a painting I did on the Lower Platt River in Sleeping Bear National Park Lakeshore. The weather was unusually warm, in the high seventies, and painting was therefore fun. So many beautiful spots that one could spend more time than the four days I was there. However, considering how much I ate it's surprising how much I painted! Could be the other way around too. At any rate, I painted from dawn to dusk for four days and then was wined and dined every evening. I couldn't ask for more than that, and the painting was really satisfying, a delight to do.

Here's a photo from that trip, taken by a friend from across the pond. They were on the Betsey Rail Trail, a popular walking and biking trail. It seemed like I was somewhat concealed, but apparently not since there were a number of walkers and riders pointing, gasping, whispering, and casting furtive looks...maybe it was the location or the trousers.

"Life Force Jewel #4" A.K.A. "Jane's Little Cutie" since the buyer and I took months to finally be in the same town at the same time with the painting.

This was an experiment in delicacy and understating the forms, done on Belgian Mist Wallis sandpaper with a gouache underpainting. The swamp where I have been working for the last year and a half has great forms and the late day light must cross a row of trees on the Western edge to strike the standing ones, no longer alive, that stand about the wetland.

After the first few months, I started to collect information about this wetland, which has only been flooded for about five years, hence, the mature trees. When I first discovered this area, there were many more trees with bark still surrounding the wood and this has almost entirely changed. The painting here was done at the transition point, when I first came upon the swamp and there were still many trees with bark shrouded in lichen and moss.

Here's where I plug in my mea culpa band aid about the long delay to actually getting the blog up and talking. More regular postings are on the schedule, however, coming back to this, I've much to post so I'll give a summary of the highlights:

Recognition:
• May thru early Nov 2007, outdoors painting 30 or 40 hours a week. It was great!
Met a mink at my usual swamp
• Oct 2007, juried into the Degas Pastel Society
• Nov 2007, two pieces included in the Springfield Museum of Art plein air show
• Nov 2007, one of the paintings at the Springfield show sold, "The Fall of Albert". It was the only painting to sell at that show.
• Dec 2007, interviewed on Insectapod.com, episode #6: My series on Coleoptera earned this attention, give it a listen it's light and has a couple of thumbnails of the work. These were last winter's answer to the weather in mid-Michigan.
• Jan 2008, two paintings accepted to the National Pastel on Paper Show, Wichita Kansas, exhibit runs March thru April
• Jan 2008, awarded scholarship to paint in Tucson March 2008
• Jan 2008, painting accepted into the Texas Nation Art Exhibit
• Jan 2008, scheduled for two-month solo show at Mackerel Sky spring of 2009


Work:
• Working larger, sold the first 18"x18" studio piece painted from a site piece at the reclamation area near MSU
• Studio/indoor assignments this winter include working at the entomology department specimen museum. And, after doing a short class in portraits, I'm negotiating access to the symphony to sketch. Other figure sources have been elusive. However, it is February and the inclement weather can't last. If nothing else, I will be in Tucson painting for eight days next month.