I love painting landscapes, but I have never been able to be a plein-air painter. I really admire the artists who brave the weather, animals and insects to set up their easels and be able to focus on the scenery, but I learned long ago to have a different approach – so I build the landscapes in my studio.
One very good reason for that is that the large size of my canvases and watercolor paper would make it very difficult to paint outdoors. The wind, alone, would make it hazardous, and Oregon weather is often unpredictable and wet.
EARLY TRAINING
My method of painting started when my children were small. My husband and I would take them on short trips to the beach or mountains and I would attempt to sketch the scenery. It soon became obvious that our children didn’t have the patience to wait while I completed a sketch and it was unfair of me to expect it.
I started taking slides of the scenery and my style of painting developed into creating a new composition from several slides of different areas. This actually became a fascination for me to start out with a few trees and then plant several others, weaving the composition and colors together as I added more branches and leaves.
DIFFERENT VIEW POINTS
I also tried different ways to view the landscapes, from distant perspectives to close-up views of the tops of trees as if I were looking out of a third story window. This became an interesting concept for me, so I started photographing scenes through windows to use in some future compositions.
Combined scenes from all over the Northwest still occupy most of my paintings, but I also have added views from other countries. One of my favorite scenes is a group of birch trees I photographed in British Columbia and the painting below is a combination of some trees I photographed through a window in Windsor Castle. I added the rest of the foliage from Oregon trees.
The title of the painting is “View from Elizabeth’s Window” and is a 36″ x 48″ acrylic.
