Summer Plein Air Paintings

What a summer! And where is that summer? Time flies by so quickly. Today the leaves on the green ash in my neighbor's yard are carpeting our yard with gold. The fall winds are bringing in cooler weather and I will be spending more time in the studio than outdoors painting. Though I spent not as many days painting outdoors as I have the past few years, I have some nice paintings to post here.

Hay harvesting--no more cubes of hay modern farmers roll their hay and then move it off the field quickly. Gerry and I had to get to this field right away or the field would have been bare. Those farmers are efficient.

A day on the Minnesota river. Early sunlight piercing the trees. A snag on the river from high water this spring.  As usual the blue is too blue. Think of those shadows as more greyed out. This was a day when I was very frustrated by forgetting half of my supplies at home. Gerry would have loaned me paint but I needed my brushes too. So made a quick trip home and then only blocked this in on site. Finished the painting at home from my photo. Gerry says I need a check list. But then I would probably for get to check the check list. ;-)

Our weather this fall has been beautiful. This is an old oak tree a the Minneopa State Park on the prairie side. Those who know the park know that it is divided in two. One side has the falls and the other prairie land and campground.  Gerry was doing a nice vista type landscape but this old tree caught my eye. I did this one mostly with a knife  and it has lots of texture. I really liked the backlit leaves on the tree. That gnarly old tree was a challenge because I had to edit down some of it's limbs in order to make the the design work.

We were a the Gustavus Arboretum a couple of times this year. What a beautiful place. There are still many more paintings waiting to come to life there.  This is across a field to an old farmstead that is on the site. I knew that the maple tree would soon be changing so I gave it a head start and gave it full autumn color. I need to find a different color to use to make rusty color grass. If you can make the grass in the foreground lighter gold.

These are all small paintings and will be for sale at the Gold Smiths Reunion (GSR) on the first weekend of December. I decided to enter a show and see how sales go. This is a popular show hopefully we will not have a storm like they had to cope with a couple of years ago.