Outside in April

The weather has been cold in flyover land, with highs in the mid-40s at best, and damp these past few days, hampering outdoor painting. So studio work has occupied a lot of the time. Happily, before the weather closed in we had some bright sunny days, mostly warm, that gave time to get outdoors. Warmth and earlier rain has caused honeysuckle undergrowth across the creek to burst into leaf, its sprays and clouds of green already scattered and beginning to hide the bare earth.

This spring one of my resolutions has been to work outside as much as possible, but with pandemic restrictions I have had to limit trips away from the home studio. The view downstream on the creek has been a favorite subject in years past, mostly because it's closer to the studio, but those earlier works were mostly watercolor. My current work is almost all oil or digital, and until now only downstream looked interesting to me. But with the sun streaming down into the honeysuckle I turned the other way for a new view.

This painting is 16x12 on panel, done looking upstream from the creek bank. The honeysuckle and grasses have begun to glow in the warm shady recesses of the woods. It took three sessions of about two hours each. After that the light changed too much. The honeysuckle branches bowed over the opposite creek bank, and in the distance a fallen tree has washed onto the shore.

"Upstream," oil on panel, 2020

I stood on the bank's edge for this one, in a cold wind that made it necessary to go indoors and warm my fingers once in a while. Even wearing good mittens wasn't much help, so every twenty minutes or so I took a few minutes to thaw. During my next to last trip inside, when the painting mostly looked like this, I heard a distinct thud and rushed to the window. Sure enough, my easel had blown over in a gust, but at least it had remained on the bank. When I got outside I found that the painting had been ejected from the easel and flown into the creek, where it was floating downstream. Naturally, I scrambled down the steep bank and retrieved it, almost falling into the water in the process. Luckily I stayed dry, the lightweight panel floated, and there was no damage. Ditto for the Open Box M. I found my brushes, cup, and rag, but the cap to the cup was nowhere to be found. Next time I'll weight down the tripod in the wind.