Plein Air Painting at Memorial Union in Madison Wisconsin

Here is a video from 2011, of a day spent painting at the memorial union. A film crew from the University saw me painting, and got a few shots of me. I was in town to see a show of paintings from my friend Marla Brenner. She was showing at the UW hospital. Her website is https://marlabrenner.com/
I was working at the Boys and Girls club that day, so I can remember being late to work that day. I painted two paintings, and then saw the show with Marla, and then got yelled at for being late to work.

Here is a painting that I did at the Union around the time that the video was shot. These are the little boats that the Hoofers Sailing club uses to teach sailing. "Grapefruit Boats at the Union" 2011

Another painting from the same timeframe. "Late Summer Farm" 2011

"Terrytown Sunset" 2011

Peninsula School of Art Workshops!

Door County is one of my Favorite Locations to paint. Door County is the 'thumb' of Wisconsin, the Peninsula of land that is surrounded by Green Bay to the west and Lake Michigan to the East. The light in Door County is prismatic, and the weather is very dramatic. Those conditions make for some memorable painting experiences!

I have two adult workshops scheduled at the Peninsula School of Art in 2019. I have been teaching painting workshops in Door County, at the Peninsula School, since 2012. Both of my classes offered this year will be two days, which is the perfect amount of time to learn the concepts that I will teach.

I will supply some special tools for the class, that will help you to compose the landscape in it's simplest forms, and then build on top of the simple structure with striking outdoor color. Everything that I teach is easy concepts, one skill leads to the next. Learning to paint does not have to be a huge ordeal, I think that you will see that I have a lot of fun when I paint, and that I keep it simple.

No matter what stage of painter you are, it is always the best idea to constantly practice the fundamentals. In this class we will have some great lessons that will help you with your drawing skills. We will make thumbnail marker sketches, so that you can learn to compose your paintings according to the values that you perceive. And finally, you will learn how to mix your colors, according to specific values using my special 'value palette'.

The Painting Light Indoor and out will start out in the studio on the first day. We will make thumbnail sketches and create paintings of a lamp-lit still life. On the second day, we will take our paints outdoors, and create some paintings en plein air. We will work the same way as in the studio, taking time to create greyscale marker sketches, and matching our paint mixtures to specific values.

In the Barns Workshop, we will spend our time outdoors painting the historic Barns of Door County! In this class, we will focus on the fundamentals of good drawing skills, and composing with marker sketches. The best part of this class is that you will learn to paint the light illuminating the landscape.

I hope to see you this summer at the Peninsula School of Art!

A Greyscale Marker Values Sketch, and the still life painting that it informed. We will create marker sketches before we paint, which will help us to get the light into our paintings.

This is the Uncropped Painting for the promotional image above. This is a very graphic painting, it is nature simplified to it's basic elements. The trees are simply shapes of shadows and light, and the ground is only some swatches of colors. The more that I paint, the more that I am interested in keeping it simple and graphic. 

This is the other uncropped image, from the promotional materials above. In this piece, I underpainted the fields with a warm orange color, and then put the greens of the field on top, leaving much of the orange showing. This broken color technique gives the feeling of outdoor color.

Organizing my Digital Images of Paintings

Outdoor Still Life  - 2011 - 16"x20" 

Happy New Year! I have set a goal to organize all of my digital photographs of paintings this year. I started painting in 2008, and have been pretty good at shooting photo's of all of my work. I have not been good at organizing the photo's. I have 4 computers with images of my work, and I'm motivated to get all of my images of paintings in one place. It's pretty cool to go back and see some of the images that are long gone, and I will probably get a little story to go with each painting.

The painting above was a still life piece that I painted in the early spring of 2011. The boquet was one that I had in the studio for a large piece that I slaved over in March of that year. The flowers must have some chemicals in them that kept them alive, because I believe that this was painted in May, and well, the flowers were not wilted.

I was looking at the paintings of Henry Hensche, and other artists associated with the Cape School of Art at this time. While Hensche would develop his sophisticated color harmonies over a series of days, my paintings in 2011 were mostly completed in one session. The flowers in this still life are mainly divided into masses of light and shade, there is not much development in color shifts beyond the simplest division of light and shade. 

I also was observing and painting the phenomena of halation in this painting. Halation is similar to refraction, it's light bouncing off of the flowers in this case, because the sunlight was very bright on this day. Refraction is light bending around an object, which I suppose is somewhat different. Physics aside, it's just painting your observations. When your eyes are squinted, you will see little flares of light bouncing around in your subject, and it's fun to try and include those. It's also something that happens when your eyes become fatigued from painting way too much. I had that problem alot in 2011.

These days, I try to do less with color shifts inside the major masses, or halation. Maybe I'll go back to those ideas, but I think that it is always a good idea to error on the side of simplicity in painting. Something done well, but very simply can say a lot with very little.