Sometimes paintings that you step away from thinking they are a incompetent seem quite finished when you came back to them. Knowing when to stop and not overworking can be much harder then it sounds. Ok, the last one is probably still unfinished….

Woke up early one morning this week and took my paints down to the valley. Here is the the sun coming out and melting away the cold night.

Found this dead little bird when I was out walking and made a drawing. I turned it into this painting when I got home.

Here are a few new paintings that are finished or pretty nearly so.

The first depicts a camping trip I took this summer when all of Washington seemed to be on fire. I attempted to drive east out of the smoke but didn’t take into account the possibility of it following me across the state.

The second was started from a drawing I made hiking high up into the cascades. It has changed many times while I’ve worked on it, so now is more of a fantasy then a picture of any real mountain. Still, I think the the feeling is the same from when I drew it. I flipped it over while painting it, thinking I liked it better that way, with the sky turned into the ground only to switch it back just at the last moment.

Then this weird little painting of some logs over a rushing creek where I camped one night. I like the look of the moving water and the strange hovering perspective the painting has. Also the light is playing some sort of trick, I have decided what is happening with that but I like that about it.

Here too is a water color I have been working on slowly since I made a drawing for it when we where house sitting in Irondale WA, this is the bay on the hood canal near that house.

Also, some teasle (a naxous weed) from along the road in the valley by my house.

https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weeds/common-teasel

And, finally a painting of mountains appearing for a moment between the trees. This painting I like a lot in certain light, then other times I don’t like it at all. I do like a painting that changes on you after you’ve looked at it a few times, but I guess with this one all of the excitement is in the details.