We’re hanging out just under 100 degrees right now here at my house and I’m planning on popsicles for dinner. Despite the discomfort, I’m glad that summer isn’t over yet. I’ll hold onto the warmth and daylight and plein air painting for as long as possible. I mean, my tomatoes are just starting to ripen!
Painted sitting under a pine tree on our 10 acre property, looking out over our neighbors’s fields toward the distant hills. Done EARLY in the morning.
It is sunflower season up here north of Spokane, which means that swarms of people are parked all along the roads and highways, trying to get selfies with the flowers. Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers (They were my wedding flowers, in fact), but I find all this sunflower mania frustrating because people are not respecting private property and are trampling and damaging the flowers-even if they don’t break any flowers getting into the field, sunflowers have a very shallow root system and the repeated trampling is not good for them. If the fields get to be too much of a hassle to maintain or the farmers can’t make a profit with the damaged plants, then there won’t be any sunflower fields at all and that would make me SO SAD.
This particular field is not far from my in-laws so I was able to spot it pretty early on. It was easy to set up along the dirt road (outside the field) to paint.
There is a saying the sunflower faces follow the movement of the sun across the sky and that is true to some extent in wild and garden varieties, but the commercial variety has a thick neck and frequently gets stuck simply pointing east, which means that in many of the fields I’ve been seeing, the sunflowers have their backs to you. Still, there’s always a couple that break the mold!
My Canna Lily is blooming its heart out and I’ve been spending time in the early morning admiring the way the light falls through the leaves.
I’m working on a large painting of a wedding bouquet for a commission. The key flowers are red Gerberas so I bought myself a bouquet and did some studies-first a quick sketch in the case of this painting and a more involved painting, as in below.
Couldn’t resist doing a purple shadow!
This is a painting of the Aer O Toaster, a large neon sculpture that hangs in the Spokane International Airport in Baggage Claim. After I did a quick sketch of it, early this year, the artist Ken Yuhasz commissioned me to do a painting for him. It was an utter delight.
Hope that you are all doing well and getting to enjoy the beautiful place we live in in whatever capacity you can.