What's on the Easel?

I waited for a sunny day to go back into this painting and correct the colors of the driveway. Erin Raedeke suggested I try a mixture of chromium oxide (which is a green) and dioxizine purple, plus white. (I am currently taking a Zoom class with Erin called Seeing Colors in White.) I mixed the colors on my palette and was skeptical, but when I applied them to my painting, it just seemed to work. I never would have thought to try mixing these two colors together! Thank you, Erin! House Across the Street, oil on linen panel, 12" x 9"

Today was sunny like yesterday, but I was disappointed to see a white van parked in the driveway of the house across the street. They are starting to get the house ready to be sold. I wasn't going to be able to work on the painting until about 2 in the afternoon, when the front of the house would again be in shadow, but would the van be gone by then? I had an errand to run (pick up my three paintings that had been in the Oatlands show with the Loudoun Sketch Club), which took over an hour. As I drove home, I wondered if the van would still be there. I got home about 1:30, and the van was gone! I had a quick lunch and got back to work on the painting just as the house's shadow started creeping up the driveway. I struggled over the color of the sun on the asphalt driveway, and I'm not entirely happy with it. It's closer to the right color than yesterday, but it strikes me as being chalky. It was crazy how quickly the shadow moved down the driveway. I was forced to stop wo...

I'm taking a zoom class with painter Erin Raedeke (if you don't know her, take a look at her website .) I've taken several of her painting classes, and I learn more every time. This one is called "Finding Color in Whites". During the week between classes, Erin told us to take a white object that is cool or warm, and arrange it with another white object that is the opposite - warm or cool. I normally don't think about color temperature when I paint - not in words, anyway. I try to match the color I see. It's different for me to label it as "cool" (more towards blue) or "warm" (leaning more towards yellow). So I'm trying to think that way for this class. Today I spent some time arranging objects for the painting. I was thinking of using a roll of paper towels, lying on a white table with some of the roll hanging over the edge of the table. It was kind of interesting, with very subtle differences between all the whites. I was fiddling ...

I haven't done any painting since October 26, the last day I painted at Oatlands. But today I finally managed to work on the large painting of Oatlands mansion from the garden. I wanted to keep the house looking kind of out of focus, and have the foreground garden be the center of interest and "narrator object". I don't love working on a painting without the subject in front of me, since I'm an observational painter, but for this I used one of the photos that I took there. I hope I didn't overly stylize the leaves of the Canna plants. I wanted to keep it kind of gestural and not too specific. Same with the white balusters of the wall.  An unusual thing about this composition, where I broke a rule, is that the balustrade cuts the painting in half horizontally. I wanted to see if I could make the composition work anyway. Normally, my plein-air paintings "are what they are" - I hardly every go back into them, because they're a record of the conditio...