The Next Adventure . . .

The trip to Cape Cod was wonderful - the weather was a bit more than uncooperative for the last few days, but I came back with a large number of field studies and about 200 photos to work with in the studio. Currently, I'm working on several large paintings and a few few smaller ones. That's the way I work - for some reason I work on anywhere between 3 and 7 paintings at a time - go figure. As the works are completed, I'll get them posted here on the blog and on the website.

On August 01, I leave for Wyoming - two weeks in the wilderness - painting and horseback riding through the mountains. I've posted a few photos from one of my prior trips so that you can get an idea of how "out there" and how magnificent the area is.

Traveling as an oil painter poses a few challenges. First, you cannot fly with your materials - they are potentially explosive so I ship them out via ground about 2 weeks prior to my trip. I'm lucky in that I have a permanent easel out there, so I don't need to worry about that . . . In Wyoming, at the "base camp" we are at about 7500 foot elevation - so the sun is very strong and it is technically desert due to the low rainfall and humidity. This means that everything dries fast, sometimes too fast, so I cut my medium with poppy oil a bit so that the paint is "open" long enough for me to work it. Poppy oil oil takes forever to dry - used alone it would takes months, or even up to a year to dry, but cutting it with another medium, such as linseed oil, makes it much more manageable to work with and in this case, is a benefit in the very dry and hot environment.

Top photo is the view from a mountain ridge, second photo down is the view from the same ridge facing out to the the mountains,and you can just barely make out the glacier that feeds the lakes in photo one, and the last photo is a view of the ranch dining hall, about 3/4 way down the same mountain. It's pretty awesome . . .