Art Journal

This is a new plein air event in cooperation with the Boulder Shakespeare  Festival going on at CU Boulder. Every summer several Shakespeare plays are performed at the Mary Rippon outdoor theater on campus. We had three days to paint the Shakespeare Garden, the outdoor Mary Rippon Theater , the indoor Roe Green theater, or scenes around the theaters - we being a group of mostly Colorado plein air artists, many  of us local artists. The Shakespeare Garden is a garden of plants , flowers and herbs, each of which has a mention in some Shakespeare play.  The garden has plaques listing the plays, naming the plants and quoting the lines mentioning the plants.   Here's the first painting I did which is of the lighting scaffold above the outdoor theater.  An exhibit will be held in September at Mary Williams Gallery in Boulder of the work we produced. We will also each produce one studio piece  for the show based on our experience.

Waiting for Darkness, 12 x 9

Rainbow Lakes is back a rough dirt road leading off from the Peak to Peak highway south of Brainard Lake. I'd never been there so we went up to hike around and paint, not a bad idea because it's cooler up there. The trail from the parking area leads uphill to three small lakes. I'd hoped for some great alpine views of the surrounding mountains but it was very forested and the views were fairly obscured. This painting was from a meadow bog area that was probably a former beaver pond in its past life. On this one I was trying out a limited palette just for a change. I used ultramarine, quinacridone violet, yellow ocher, and indian yellow, so no bright yellow.

High Country trees, 8 x 10

I went to Sandstone Ranch planning to possibly paint the early morning sky but this scene with the sun coming up behind a tree with the reflections in the pond caught my eye and this is where I ended up painting.  The point here was to try to get the sunlight coming through the trees to look right. There were a lot of darks to deal with and trying to get them dark but still trying to distinguish the grass from the trees from the bushes was tricky.

Shining Through, 10 x 8

So here are the final paintings of mine that were selected for the event coming up in August. The show hangs on August 9th, opens on August 11th and continues till the 13th, at the new event center in Crested Butte.

Cloudy Mountain Day, 11 x 14

Washington Gulch, 8 x 10

Sunrise Clouds, 8 x 10

June Radiance, 9 x 12

Here's a painting from Sandstone Ranch, from last week. The park is lush and green from all the rain we've had this spring and early summer so it was very pleasant. I heard wild turkeys, saw plenty of blue herons flying around. It's a good year for the wildlife, so far anyway. Our area has avoided the extreme heat up till now, unlike a lot of other places in the west.

Here's the painting, Summer Shade, 9 x 12.

I went out hoping to catch a nice evening painting and maybe get a good sunset, but it ended up being a practically cloudless sky. I stayed till the mosquitos became almost unbearable, even for me, who usually doesn't mind the bugs that much. So here's the painting. I admit I had to bring it home slightly unfinished due to the insect cloud,  and  I filled in the rest of the sky at home.

Sunset at Pella, 9 x 12

Here's the latest in the rooftop series.  I went for some more intense reds and more saturated colors inspired by the red of the brick.

Rooftop #5, 16 x 16

So I went back to Crested Butte for a couple days to paint again for the Crested Butte Plein Air. This time we camped. Camping there is difficult as there are few places to camp and a lot of the high country still has winter closures to the roads. Open camping on national forest is not permitted. Some of the camp sites are still not available unless you've got a good 4WD vehicle, which we don't have. But we were lucky and found the last untaken site, a gorgeous site surrounded by fabulous views and a profusion of the first early wildflowers starting to come out. The downside was a short uphill driveway littered with rocks and gullies but somehow we made it up the drive with our 2WD car.  It was lovely there. I did three paintings of views right at the campsite. Here they are:

Sunrise Clouds, 8 x 10, done starting at 5:30 in the morning. We went to bed when the sun went down so I actually woke up wide awake and ready to paint as it started to get light. Mosquitos were pesky though.

June Radiance, 9 x 12, wildflowers in morning light after breakfast on a bank just next to our camp table.

Mountain Hillside, 9 x 12, an afternoon view to the southwest of our tent. Some snow patches were still up there.

I've got a collection of  nine larger studio landscape paintings showing at Flatirons Terrace for the month of July. The show will go up on July 3 and be up until August.

Here's one of the pieces from the show.

Closing Down, 16 x 20

Here are a couple paintings from a morning session at Boulder Valley Ranch. The first is a view of the mesas overlooking the ranch, still in their spring green stage, a rarity for late June, and the second is a view looking across the valley toward the Boulder Reservoir. The air was not as clear or brilliant as it is some days so everything had a sort of almost misty quality to it that day. Pollution or a slight layer of smoke?

Boulder ranch hills, 9 x 12.

Ranch Vista, 9 x 12.

I signed up for crested Butte plein air event and went up and painted at some of the open class events in early June. The event is being run by Shaun Horne from his gallery in Crested Butte. He took us out to one of his favorite sites where we painted for a morning. On that trip I produced four paintings, two of which have been accepted for the show.

They include a scene I painted up Washington Gulch of the hillside with aspen trees just starting to bud out, and a painting of the very much snow-covered mountain near Gothic on a very cloudy afternoon. I'm not sure of the name of this mountain. It might be Mt. Baldy. Snow was heavier this winter and the snowmelt was almost a month late so there was still a lot of snow on the mountains and only the very earliest wildflowers were starting to show up.

Cloudy Mountain Day, 11 x 14

Washington Gulch, 8 x 10

This was from another local paintout at a country home with a good view of the mountains. We went to paint the homeowner's fabulous flower garden but I was first drawn to this great view of Longs Peak with rain clouds hovering over it. Later it did rain on us.

And I did get to do a quick flower painting sketch while I was there also.

Rainy Day Ahead, 8 x 10.

Diane's Flowers, 8 x 10

These are the latest of my rooftop paintings. It all started when I got a good view of surrounding rooftops from one of the top floors of a parking garage  and became interested in the patterns and shadows of all the stuff that goes on commercial roofs these days and decided to make some paintings.  This first attempt #3 had some things I didn't like, like the angle of the shadows. So I did it again with a view from earlier in the morning when the shadows are longer and "moving" some AC units around. And that gave me Rooftop #4. But I thought people might like to see both. #3 on the left, #4 on the right.

This was an early morning at Hamms Pond. I was hoping for a nice sunrise but the sky was fairly clear and uneventful looking so I ended up painting looking toward the mountains with the trees starting to catch the rising morning light.  Yellow headed blackbirds were swooping past, calling out, probably annoyed at my presence while cormorants were waking in the nearby trees, every now and then, one of them taking off for the water. It was nice and peaceful.

May Morning, 8 x 10

I didn't sign up for the Plein Air Convention in Denver this year but  I did volunteer for three days at the convention and go to some sessions. I made it to the paintout at El Dorado Canyon and ended up painting this tree painting.

El Dorado Trees, 12 x 9.

Here's another painting from a  local paintout at a flower and herb farm near Boulder CO. Peonies were in bloom but a lot of the flowers were just starting to come up so not yet at their peak. I liked the converging rows of different greens and colors. I was trying out a new painting board called Senso painting panels that are linen with a transparent gesso surface. They worked great. (available at Jerrys Artarama).

They are nice because the natural linen color acts like a toned canvas.

Flower Farm, 8 x 10.