“The Turning”, 40″ x 60″ oil and wax on canvas.
The Pacific Northwest has an abundance of scenery to inspire me for my paintings and most of my landscapes feature them. When my children were small, there was no way that I could take the time to sketch the scenery, so I started taking reference slides and learned to compose my paintings in the studio.
Over the years, my interest has been mostly of nature at its most dramatic – with patterns of colorful leaves against backgrounds of trees, rivers and mountains. The slides have provided me with much material with which to compose the paintings, but seldom have I been able to use just one slide. I usually like a group of trees in one, a branch of leaves in another and ferns from several other slides and then I create my own impressionistic version of what I originally viewed.
INSPIRED BY POWERFUL IMAGES
Several of my paintings have been composed from just a few slides that still inspire me. Rather than get tired of these images, I’ve been challenged to paint them in different settings and colors. Even so, I constantly look for new ways to get inspired and new images to keep my creativity fresh.
Fortunately, I have a cousin who travels a lot and is a wonderful photographer and she sends me photos of scenery from her trips. Lately, I’ve been using several of her photos even more than my own and have been enjoying painting the new scenery.
The painting above is one of these, the second in a series of the same river in New Hampshire, but with a Northwest group of vine maple leaves in the foreground as well. It will be in one of the two shows I’m having at the Lawrence galleries in September.
