The Red Barn

All summer my guy and I trained to do a metric century bike ride. After trying out a couple of highway routes that proved to be absolutely awful for cyclists (no shoulder, shoulder that disappears, shoulder that exists on one side of the road but not the other, shoulder that is three inches wide and next to a curb... what kind of moron put a curb in on a secondary highway? Really now) we found one route that worked.

So as I've been riding on the overpass above this farm every week I've been staring at the barn thinking "OH GOD I'M GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK hmmm... I should paint that thing. It looks nice. Would it be more of a quinacridone red or cadmium red middle? Shit here comes a pothole. Only 60 more kilometers to go!"

At the end of the summer I finally got out to paint the farm. It was very different painting it from the dirt road than looking at it from the highway overpass. Less spandex, for one. And many, many more thistles. After a pleasant afternoon of baking in the sun and sitting in a thistle patch, I tried out the huaraches at a food truck in a nearby town and then dragged this painting back to the studio, where I applied many changes to it. I think I'm finally having a breakthrough in painting.

Assiniboia Lilac

Perspective! My nemesis! So, at last we meet for the first time for the last time!

I started this... I think in May 2012, and it has sat in the pile of unfinished paintings until I pulled it out and decided that I wanted to try something different with the light and shadows. The building is one of the oldest on the U of A campus, where I spent some time in my undergrad years having labs, then teaching labs, and then -- after I graduated -- changing backup tapes in the basement. It now houses the Philosophy department, where I also spent a few of my post-graduate semesters.

Lilac season on campus is lovely, following flowering crabapple season which starts real spring off with a bang. (There is also fake spring which starts on March 21, is alternately brown and snowy, and lasts for 2 months.) It is by far my favourite time of the year.

Blackfoot Beaver

 

I thought it was a bit shameful that I didn't make it out to paint very often this year, what with the cycling and all, so I decided to remedy that by going out to Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Park.  It didn't look like it was going to be an auspicious trip.  I started late, and I got a bit lost on the way, second-guessing myself and then third-guessing and then getting stuck waiting for a train.  I finally made it there only to discover that I was at the wrong entrance, but it was too late to remedy that.  While walking I realized that it was very hot and humid and I didn't feel very good at all.

I started out along one of the trails looking for a lake, and then wasted time trying to find a viewpoint from which I could actually SEE any lake.  The water level was so high that it was puddling around the bottom of the heavy brush surrounding the lake and I couldn't work my way around to any area that was dry enough to sit on that didn't have trees or bushes in the way.

I eventually gave up, went down the other trail and after a bit of exploring I discovered this shallow bit of water, surrounded by reeds and thorn bushes.  There was an old wooden platform to sit on but I found a dry spot right on the edge of the water.

After I had set up and spend some time painting there, I heard a splash.  I was hoping for waterfowl but instead I got this beaver.  It swam out a few meters away from me and then spent quite a long time chewing on the stick, stripping it of bark.  It left, but came back some minutes later, dragged the stick away, then came back and dug another stick out of the muddy lake bottom.  My whole time painting was punctuated by periods of industrious beaver chewing.

It is interesting how similar beavers look to capybaras when they are in the water.

Anyway, I got everything laid in while I was there, and then finished it up over a couple days at home.  I got some really nice close-ups of the beaver with my camera.  I really like how the logs on the left turned out and the backlit grasses.  The bottom of the painting is not so successful, I may end up cropping an inch off it.

But anyway -- the first decent painting of 2013!  I believe this is my 77th painting.  Hopefully I can get closer to 100 by the end of the year.

Industrial Park

Art Walk 2012 is coming up soon and I'm finishing up all the paintings I can manage.  I posted the WIP for this one back in April.  In the end I didn't like the composition so much so I moved some things around and cropped that big blank stretch of wall out of the picture.  (Hooray for table saws!)  The patch of yellow and green paint isn't sitting smack at the edge of the painting now but is a nice and unproblematic focal point.

Telford Lake

Telford Lake in Leduc, Alberta.  I went out to paint plein-air and the location was lovely.  In the end I got rained out a bit and wasn't able to finish on-site.

Acrylic on hardboard.

Mill Creek Skyscape

The last time I went out the clouds were just amazing. I had to get this done quick because the wind was whipping them across the sky.

And then I got rained on.