Wonder Where the Flowers Is?

Spring has sprung,
Grass has riss,
Wonder where the flowers is?

Always wanted a place to use that little ditty. This was a great exercise in painting the entire background carefully and then integrating the trees over the top. I am too tired now to go into the drama of the day. I will  only say that the mystery people in hard hats returned (from a previous post) and turned out to be great allies when my car was vandalized in the parking lot. They guarded my car and belongings while I continued painting and were very compassionate about the incident. Way to go Conservation Corp members!

Bruce Vento Morning

You may look at this and think "I've seen this before," and yes, you have. This is the studio painting from the sketch in a previous post. It was fun to improvise and make up the prairie grasses effect.

I am sad that winter melted in the course of a couple of weeks. Thin strips of residual snowbank are a nice constrasting touch to the quiet landscape grayness before spring pops into citrusy yellow fringes around the treetops. The next few months will be challenging for me with the mixing of hundreds of green hues (and usually none of them are correct), but this year is my year to conquer greens!

Portrait #2

After finishing Ron the Portrait in Instructor Richard's Studio Class, I brought it home looked at it for a couple of days and then spent eleven more hour working on it. Another artist asked how many of those were "good" hours...well, there was a lot of destruction in the first five (and no "undo" keys) and then some very good decisions were made in the last 3 hours. Those decisions were about simplifying the form and paying attention to plane changes as if his face was another element in the landscape. It is far more painterly than this digital rendition indicates, but then that's why we go to see original works. Original works have a quality that can't be duplicated in pixels or printed pages for that matter.

Will there be other portraits? Yes, I found painting a portrait intriguing and now have rediscovered 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and The Girl with Red Hat, in particular, as an inspiration for another. It is not the composition or subject matter that is compelling, it is the simplicity found in all of his work. It looks complex, but is elemental in execution. Simplification sounds easy to do, but in reality it is harder than making a photographic likeness. It is the illusive bird of paradise from a painter's perspective.