I just love doing these little studies of Italian scenes. They're two dimensional but have such a wonderful ambience about them. This reminds me so much of a time I long ago visited the isle of Burano in the Venetian Lagoon. We had a wonderful supper in an out of the way little restaurant and while there met a very interesting couple who asked us back to their room for a nightcap on Piazza San Marco. We left the restaurant and boarded our boat home around midnight and went to our new found friends room known as the Verdi Suite and actually was home to Verdi on his frequent visits to Venice. A piece of his original work was framed on the wall as proof.

I tried a number of different approaches to this scene and although a wonderful subject I'm just not there yet dealing with the complexity of this type of painting. But I soldier on and hope the next will get better. I like a lots of things I did with this painting. The sky, little town and to some degree the water I've been struggling with are getting better. But I'm still having a problem getting the boats to actually rest on the water. Should I paint the water-shadows darker? Or should I forget the shadows and concentrate on just the boats? Lots of choices. But slowly I'm learning new techniques and hope to pull them all together at some point into a really good painting.

Did you notice the building in the background is too dark taking the eye away from the subject?

This painting is for those of you who've been out on the open ocean. It is truly one of those experiences that offers insight into how to deal with life. Your entire existence is locked into a small space and every single element in that space must perform or your life is literally on the line. Here we have a crew of three having that experience. I dedicate this painting to a close friend soon to complete a 10 day cruise across the Atlantic.

Since I grew up in a maritime coastal city the sea has became a part of me at an early age. I've spent many a day bobbing on a surfboard staring at the horizon and wondering what was just over it. The horizon allows the brain to decompress, expand beyond the tangible and imagine.
The sailboat, or any boat for that matter, allows you to actually travel across the time/space horizon and explore. After all, isn't that the American spirit?

This painting challenged me in several ways. I wanted the deep blues of the open ocean and I think I've achieved that. But how to show the huge waves that one encounters on the ocean? My next painting challenge!

I choose this painting to do because I've been complaining about better understanding how to paint values. It's a fine example of using extremely dark colors to provide a contrast to the wonderful tower in the background. I even put just a hint of three people in the alleyway behind.

This is an exercise from a really fun website called Watercolorpainting.com. The 'class' shows how to do this painting step by step and it's fun to utilize other painter's techniques to see if you can indeed do it. I learn something every time I've done an exercise and this one is no different. Actually, it turned out to be a rough copy of the original and for those who've tried to copy someone else's work you know its almost impossible to do. Not even the original painter can make a similar copy twice in a row. So I added my embellishments and changed a few things to make it easier to understand which makes it my own creation.

*For those interested the blue highlighted area is linked to the website.

You know in the winter it can get pretty drab with all the rain, snow, clouds and wind and I choose this photograph on a day that was both rainy and cold. You can certainly tell where my head was can't you?

Painting palm trees is a something new for me. I don't think I effectively painted this one but I did get the shadow right! Maybe next time I should concentrate on the tree instead of the shadow. But that brings me to the subject of getting the values correct in a painting. Those of you who've followed this blog know I've been struggling with this issue almost from the beginning. One of my followers, Krys Pettit, watercolorist extraordinaire, recently commented that as I move further along in my knowledge of watercolor I'll realize that value contrast is the name of the game. This painting proves that completely.

Standing back from this painting I realize that the shadow value makes such a big difference here. Also the color of the sky. I should have gone back and re-glazed the sky one more time to get a darker hue. Just not enough contrast between it and the ocean. I like the feel of the painting. At least it gives me a 'warm' feeling especially on those cold days!

Actually I think this painting came out pretty well considering it was probably the most difficult project I've done so far. I tried twice to get the dimensions on the barn correct and 'finally' I think the length and depth are in the correct ratio.

Whitford's barn is located on Cuba Lake at Cuba, NY. I'll bet you didn't know Cuba was actually in NY did you? What are they famous for? Cuba Cheese which is some of the finest domestic cheese in the country and while there we bought a chunk of 15 year-old aged cheddar. I promise some of the finest you'll ever taste.

This barn is an old one and I don't really know what style you would call it. Mr. Whitford has done an extensive preservation of it and I think its one of the most beautiful barns I've ever photographed. See the photo below of it.

Lots of good things in this painting and lots of not so good. I'll leave it to the viewer this time to tell me what they think and what I should do to improve.

Everyone has a 'camp' in Upstate NY it seems. Camp is often a confusing term often meaning a tent, sometimes a trailer, often a very crude cabin but most likely a very comfortable place to wile away the hours. Most often used in winter for a place to base a hunting group camps are as much a part of the landscape in the NE as 'beach houses' are in the southern part of the US.

This road leads to the 'camp' in Belmont, NY and is bordered along its length with birches, oaks and sugar maples and you can see a panoply of beautiful wildflowers during three months of the year. My recent painting of the aster was taken along the road.

My painting is an attempt to give you the feel that you're traveling through a cathedral of nature. You'll notice that I painted the limbs above the road to give the viewer that feel.

I think I overworked this painting and it should have been simpler in execution. Painting a forest is a complicated and confusing thing to do, limbs, vines and shrubs all converge and confuse the painter. I suffered from some of this and after I was done I stood back and looked at the limb structures and realized they didn't make logical sense. A limb follows a very logical sequence on the tree and in some cases mine didn't.

I do like the feel of the painting and look forward to trying another forest painting in the future.
I think as painters we're looking for more complex paintings to try and I find I'm not quite up to speed yet to attempt some of these but I give them a shot anyway!

Here's one I'm a little more proud of. This old barn located near Angelica, NY has been sitting here looking at me for many years. I really never noticed it and frankly it was probably a working farm when I first saw it almost 7 years ago. But winters are tough in Angelica and they'll take an old barn like this down quickly.

I loosened up on this painting, didn't overwork it and I think it turned out fine. I used some of Tony Couch's methods and they do make it easier if you follow him closely. I've yet to master the wet on wet technique he uses but this one had a few spots in it that lent themselves to experimentation, the barn and roof for instance.

Blera, Italy a wonderful little out-of-the way Italian town some 1 hour north of Rome is situated right in the middle of the Etruscan countryside. Blera is surrounded on three sides by river canyons and literally thousands of Etruscan tombs are burrowed into the hillsides of the canyon walls. The business of grave robbing must have started here, with over 7,000 tombs robbed over the 2,000+ years since the Etruscans disappeared into the haze of time.

Blera remains a quiet agricultural based economy and in the evening the farmers and townsmen gather at the ancient overlook in the main piazza for discussion and an occasional drink together. The rhythm of the seasons drives the lifestyle but alas like many of the small Italian towns Blera is mostly populated by older citizens with children drifting off to larger cities.

My intention with this painting is to feature the town on the hill. I'll leave it up to you if I succeeded. The painting has the same problems that have cropped up in past attempts and I'm beginning to appreciate how difficult it is to get those deep colors needed in watercolor paintings sometimes. It's hard to see how dark your values will remain since when wet they appear two to three times darker than when dry.

Here's a departure for me, a still life. This is officially the first one I've ever done and I enjoyed it. Taken from a photograph on my recent trip it displays a native aster. The wildflowers were in full bloom in western NY during September and were truly a sight to behold. Goldenrod, asters, purple loosestrife, chicory, lots of seeds and native grasses all in full bloom/plume. Quite a riot of color heading into the drab winter months.

I learned a few things with this painting. 1. The background is difficult to decide and paint. Do you simplify it like I did here or do you place all the little nuances of the background into it? 2. How do you paint the flower itself? Single or in multiple blooms. 3. How do you compose the painting? I consciously tried to create balance with this painting by leaving a large unpainted space on the right. 4. How detailed should it be? I've almost painted this in a Japanese style, very simple, not confused.

My next project? An Italian landscape.

The Alton Sylor Memorial Bridge over Joney Gorge in Angelica, NY is one of the modern wonders of this area. Constructed in the last several years the span is completely built of wood with its beams some 10' thick. I often wonder why DOTs around the US seem to ignore the majesty of bridges and give us the same old concrete Interstate Highway bridges ad nauseum. As you can see in the photo below it's a beautiful thing.

Here's my painting and I'm beginning, and I say just beginning, to understand water and how to paint it. With this painting I see a number of things I'd like to change and elements I simply missed. For instance, my placement of the rocks in the foreground doesn't exactly tell the story of the river and the rock shelfing that happens in this stretch. Also, I'm working on my values, the darkness and lightness, here too much is of the same value so I'll need to continue work on that.

I hope you enjoy this one, it took me awhile just to draw it, lots of details I just didn't see in the original photograph. Which reminds me that painting definitely improves your ability to see what's around you and appreciate the details.

What do you think? Is it a fair representation of the scene? What could I have done better?

OK everyone, as I promised here are a few of the photos I took on my trip to western NY over the last week. Which would you like for me to paint? Put them in order and maybe I'll do them all!

Here's a painting I did early on in 2006 after a short trip to Seaside, FL.

Don't give up if you haven't seen a recent painting yet! I'll be back on line in a couple of days. I'm going to put a few of the photo's I've taken on my trip and get everyone to vote on which one's I should paint first.

Here's the painting for today, taken off a mountain in western NY, near the small village of Belmont. Western NY looks much like the mountain areas of northern Georgia except the fall comes much earlier. As of late September this area has already had two frosts and the maples are already starting to turn. It won't be long before the maple syrup gathers begin to reap their sugary harvest and make their wares.

This painting was done above a small pond seen in the foreground. Off in the distance are two mountains I painted in different shades of blue. In retrospect I got a little too creative with this painting and needed to de-emphasize the background and concentrate on the foreground more. If you look at my previous painting, English Countryside you can see a better developed scene than this one. My next attempt will be one of the wonderful old barns that seem to be disappearing into dust in this part of NY once the part of the dairy capital of America. The Erie Canal was built in part to transport dairy products from the area but due to modern farming economics most farming is gone and the entire western part of NY is reverting to wind farms and forests. Even the people are leaving.

I painted this several years ago and although this isn't the best scan of the painting it gives you a good feel of a typical beachhouse located on almost any beach on the east coast of the US.

I'm still on the road and will give you a few of my paintings soon. I've completely one mountain scene which I'll quickly post.

The Chatauqua Institute on Chatauqua Lake in western NY state is one of the true gems of Americana. Not only does it contain a vast array of classic Victorian architecture but it also retains its relevancy with a complete summer series of contemporary lectures, music, art and recreational opportunities. Truly one of the great places of America and still available to anyone who ventures there.

I'll be on hiatus for the next couple of weeks although I will attempt to paint while on the road. I'll drop a few paintings on the blog that I did several years ago in the meantime and thanks everyone for following, you'll see a series of interesting paintings from a special place in America when I get back.

I completed this original today another in the series featuring Chester, Nova Scotia Raceweek. As I've noted several times before, I'm working on understanding how to paint water. This painting gets me a little closer to mastering it. Although it looks blotchy in this scan, the original actually reflects a better grasp of how to do water. I'm working on reflections in the water and I'll soon have that mastered too I hope.

This painting is 11" x 16" a size that allowed me to detail the sailboat accurately. You can see that I've placed all the lines correctly and the rigging is also correct. I need help with sketching the people on board and will also tackle that as I move along.

With kudos to Perspective-Depth and Distance by Geoff Kersey I painted this today as an exercise from his book. Although the colors don't exactly duplicate the original painting this is a fair approximation and you can see this painting is also in pretty loose form. This is the largest painting I've done so far 16" x 20" and took approximately two hours to complete, so I'm definitely getting faster and a by-product of that is a much more fluid painting.

This painting has a number of perspective elements that give it depth. You'll notice first the road going off in the distance and then looking up the small houses sitting out in the field. Much further back is a range of mountains which I painted too dark. They should recede into the distance getting lighter as the go back but you can see that tonally the are similar. The other element I missed was the small lake in the background that is too dark also. Notice it looks much more like a cloud reflected on the landscape instead of a lake.

The sky's are getting better. I used a small kleenex to dab the clouds out of the wet paint and I think these look more realistic than some of my earlier attempts.

I haven't painted much in three days so here you have my best attempt at a lovely English Landscape.

I've mentioned in previous postings that I did watercolors several years ago and put it down until recently. Just so you can see the type of paintings I did in 2007 I've included this painting of a photograph I took in Italy. I actually cheated on this one because if you'll notice it has tiny white flowers on the vine on the wall. Since watercolor doesn't come in white I used gauche to put in the flowers. This is a very common technique and although the gauche is technically a watercolor it doesn't have the luminosity of watercolor and is most often used to touch up a small detail.