Iris Shoots Along the Slough

oil on hardboard panel, 8" x 10"

This little painting I started the other day at Covelo Ranch, thinking I'd work on it some more yesterday, but I had only brought two little palette knives with me.  Eventually, frustration overtook the project and I ended up wiping it.  Oh well, there's always another day, but I thought I'd memorialize it here, poor thing.  

I've been reading a large, fascinating tome about Vincent van Gogh entitled, "Van Gogh:  The Life," by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, and I've been letting my colors veer a bit from what is considered "correct," in search of my own sense of color harmony.  Van Gogh himself decried abstract painting, but in the last year of his life he loosened that view as his paintings veered ever closer to abstraction themselves.  I was attempting to do that here, with the turquoise grass in the upper left corner, simply because I found it so beautiful against the brownish water and linking it to two of the iris shoots next to the tree trunk.  I hope to explore this whole idea more in my paintings, but will need all the tools at my disposal for it.

Faye with Plum Trees and Foot Bridge

iPad painting, 10" x 14"

This is a sketch of the side yard by the main house at the Covelo Ranch, with the slough in the mid ground, and Faye is one of the three very lucky Border Collies who get to call this home. 

Mill Creek at Covelo Ranch

iPad painting, 14" x 10"

This was done on site at my friends' ranch outside the town of Covelo in Mendocino County, in between storms, which left the creek a beautiful orange/brown color.  I am hoping to do some plein air paintings there this spring.  They have about 21 sheep, 3 border collies, 2 horses, and 100 acres of wild, natural landscape.  That adds up to a lot of painting possibilities.  Now, if the weather will just cooperate, . . .