Canadian Sunset

This is from a photo taken behind our barn up in Canada, of a sunset over the fields. Sunset paintings are a dime a dozen of course. But this photo was so dramatic I just felt an urge to give it a try. I failed miserably alas. Glorious sunsets are just so hard to capture. But at least I don't hate this quite as much as I did during about 95% of the time that I was working on it. Most of the time it looked just a horrible, jarring mish-mosh of weird and unconnected colors that were totally meaningless.  But at the very last minute it finally came together and gave me at least a little hint of what I hoped to capture. 

Baie des Chaleurs Take 2

It was in 2005 that I visited with friends in Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula. I drove up from our farm in New Brunswick, a long 400-mile journey. I was getting tired as I approached Campbellton, and yet still had a long way to go, but pulled over to the side of the road to catch a glimpse of the Bay of Chaleur, which separates New Brunswick from the Gaspe. The vista was so stunning I had to take several pictures. 

Ever since I've wanted to paint a picture of that scene. I made my first attempt at it, using my photos as reference, with this rendition back in March. 

And I just was not happy with it. It didn't capture the scene the way I wanted to.  I rarely paint a scene over again, but I so *wanted* this one to be wonderful,  and I just didn't like it. So last night I decided to try again, on a sheet of 9x12 Art Spectrum,  and if it "felt" better from the Canson of the first version. 

But, , I'm not sure I'm any happier with this picture than I was with the first. There are some things I like in that one, and some in this one. But overall neither do justice to the my memory of the scene. Maybe it's just not for me to capture except in my mind's eye.

Beachkirk

I  can't get away from my "Atlantic Canada" kick! Today I chose to work from a photo, and went back, as I seem to do a lot, to Atlantic Canada. This is from a photo I took on the beach of our summer farm up in New Brunswick. I'm facing sort of northwards, and off in the distance you can see "Beachkirk" a lovely little old church that was at one time converted into a textile museum, and a charming one too. But alas the woman who owned and ran it became too ill and elderly to keep it up, and she sold it into private hands. It's no longer open to the public but it's still a l0vely local landmark.

Birthday Tea Two

I still have the photos I took from the birthday tea that my two friends took me on - though not as many as I would like. Alas I'm rather a dismal photographer, and the photos often come up looking not too useful as reference photos. But I decided I would give one more a try. This was done on my new usual support of 9x12 Art Spectrum.

It was a bit of a pain in the neck as everything was rather *small* on a sheet that size. I hate fiddling with tiny details like that, so this took a couple hours or better, much more time than I really like to spend on one single painting. But now there are two paintings. I guess if I can do a third it will really be a bit of a "series". LOL.

Birthday Tea One

My birthday is March 30. Last Saturday two friends took me out to lunch to this wonderful restaurant/tea room called Teaberry's in Flemington, NJ. It's a darling converted Victorian home, very cute. We had a lovely meal and tea there. I had brought my camera, and my friends kept arranging things on the table, and getting me to arrange things too, into still lifes and telling me to take photos, which I did.

So then they said they expected to see a series of paintings from these photos! :-) Well as usually happens the photos were not as wonderful as I had hoped, but some were not too bad. So I decided to try one today and see if I might do a "tea series".